Why George Cooper's Young Sheldon Funeral Episode Had To Be Re-Edited

Sometimes a TV show starts to change throughout its run, morphing into something new as the writers and producers get a handle on what works best for the characters and story. The most obvious and common changes are often to a show's tone, as initial ideas are either softened or sharpened and things get more complex. Just look at the brilliant political satire "Veep," which starts as a vulgar dark comedy but eventually becomes depressingly real in its satire, with a final season that's pretty much pitch-black. The hit CBS comedy "Young Sheldon" had a little bit lighter of a transformation, but it was no less dramatic. Already wildly different from its predecessor, "The Big Bang Theory," by simple means of using a single-camera format with no studio audience, "Young Sheldon" transformed even further throughout its seven-season run to become a heartfelt family dramedy. 

In the show's later seasons, series showrunners Steven Molaro and Steve Holland combined drama and comedy in just the right amounts to make a show that had as many truly heartfelt moments as it had hilarious ones, although there was one episode where they really had to change things up a bit. In the series' penultimate episode, "Funeral," the Cooper family patriarch, George Sr. (Lance Barber) is being memorialized, and the jokes are nowhere to be found. That's intentional, but it's the result of some re-edits the creators felt were needed to really make the episode sing. 

In an interview with Parade, Holland revealed that although the original plan for the episode had a standard amount of jokes peppered in when they watched it in editing they realized that the humor felt really out of place:

"We wanted to be very respectful of George as a character and what his passing meant to this family. I think we realized that we could give ourselves permission to be a little more serious and have a little more weight in this moment, which felt very real to us. We could treat it as realistically as we wanted to. We didn't feel the need to just throw jokes in because it was a comedy show."

The result was a truly heartbreaking episode that is the series' best, according to IMDb, and the lack of jokes allowed the characters to really show their emotional depth in one of the most difficult times in their lives. The loss of George Sr. would have major repercussions that would echo not only through "The Big Bang Theory" but also the "Young Sheldon" spin-off, "Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage," and it's great that the show's creators took the moment seriously.

When "Young Sheldon" began, Sheldon and his siblings were quite young, with Sheldon and his twin sister Missy (Reagan Revord) starting the series at the age of 9, and their older brother Georgie (Montana Jordan) is 14. The actors portraying them were of a similar age, which is rather young to deal with some of the heavier themes of the later seasons, but as they aged, the show could mature along with them. 

Holland said that they "knew at this point that the kids were gonna knock this out of the park," and that they put some of their real feelings of sadness about the show's end into their performances. They're all fantastic (Revord is devastating) and they make the loss of goofy, genuine George Sr. feel that much more real. It's great stuff even if it's not funny at all for what is usually a comedy series, although there is one joke at least: George's actor, Lance Barber, has a secret cameo as one of the funeral attendees. Even in life's darkest moments, there can be a little bit of lightness.