They tried to kill Young Sheldon, but his power has only grown

A few months back, CBS announced that it was indulging in hubris bordering on blasphemy, stating its intention to kill the child-god Young Sheldon, simply because the Sheldon in question wasn’t actually all that young anymore. (Star Iain Armitage is 15 now, and the Jim Parsons DNA we assume was injected into his neck when he first took the role back 2017 has now truly taken root.) The network has since tried to rescind at least part of its affront to the natural order by announcing a spin-off series of the massively popular spin-off, which will presumably check in, every once in a while, to report on Sheldon’s continuing de-youth-ing. But if you come at the god-king, you best not miss: Young Sheldon’s final season premiere this weekend was reportedly its best showing in years, reinforcing what we’ve been shrieking, desperately for years, i.e., that the American public will never truly let this terrifying child die.

Now, to be fair, Young Sheldon did have a pretty massive boost from the Super Bowl, an event that we can only assume the child in question would, himself, condemn. CBS made an aggressive ad push for the show during The Big Game, which turned out to be the most-watched event in television history, or at least the most-watched since Nielsen started measuring that stuff. So it’s not entirely surprising to hear that Young Sheldon posted 7.99 million direct viewers on Thursday night, its highest-rated premiere since 2019. (Ghosts, which, shares the Thursday night 8 o’clock slot with Young Sheldon, got a similar push, and posted its best first-night viewership ever this week.)

The upshot of which is that those are very good numbers for a show entering its seventh season, making the aging series one of CBS’s most successful of the week. (Although it’s a bit more sobering when compared to Young Sheldon’s parent series, the scarily popular The Big Bang Theory, which posted almost 19 million viewers for its own 7th-season premiere back in 2013.) We still don’t know why people want to watch Sheldon be Young; it seems likely at this point that we never will. But they goddamn do—including on Netflix, where the show landed in November and started climbing the charts, which might have also contributed to last night’s win—and will presumably do so until the exact minute CBS finishes sealing him in his solid platinum sarcophagus at the end of this final season.

[via THR]