Ensuring that Sheldon Cooper’s grim rulership over the TV airwaves—a veritable Bazingoligarchy, if you will—will never truly expire, CBS announced today that it’s renewing its Big Bang Theory spin-off Young Sheldon for another two seasons on the air. The Iain Armitage-starring single-cam is the second-highest-rated comedy on network TV right now, trailing only behind its parent show, because goddamn do people love it when a character awkwardly says a “smart” thing, and then the “normal” people around them all patiently roll their eyes.
The amazing thing about Young Sheldon is that it frequently manages to be a wholly different flavor of pandering than Big Bang Theory, which is scheduled to end this year. Watching it tread through the beats of various “Aw, but they really do love each other!” family comedy arcs, you could barely expect that it was born out of the planet’s most nigh-omnipotent multi-cam jokefest.
Anyway, to paraphrase George Orwell: If you ever need to imagine a vision of the future, imagine a Young Sheldon, smirking on a human face, forever, because this little sucker’s not going anywhere anytime soon.