Warning: spoilers ahead for Stuart Fails to Save the Universe season 1, episode 10, “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience.”
In the last minutes of the season, the four main characters of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe suddenly find themselves standing in the comic book store. And it’s the version you know from The Big Bang Theory, laugh track energy and all.
That’s a big swing for a finale. And the people who made it have now explained why they went there.
Why go back at all
Creators Chuck Lorre, Zak Penn and Bill Prady were asked in an interview with Deadline where the idea came from and whether the moment was meant as a tribute to the original series. Penn said the homage was part of it, but it wasn’t a mission statement.
“Yeah, that was definitely part of it. These guys [Lorre and Prady] have a lot to say about it, so it was pretty fertile ground. I don’t think we said at the beginning of the season, we must comment on the sitcom, that wasn’t a goal,” Penn said.
Lorre’s reasoning was simpler, and a little gleeful. If the show already threw its characters into a comic book, a sitcom was fair game.
“If our characters on their adventure, on their journey, could be trapped into a comic book, they could certainly be trapped into a sitcom. I mean, we’ve gone past any boundaries of rationale, and this is a spectacularly cool thing to do, let’s do it. Can we explain it? We’re gonna try, we’re certainly going to try,” Lorre said.
Honestly, that’s the most Chuck Lorre sentence possible. He admits there’s no logic holding it together, and he does it anyway.
The set you saw wasn’t the original
Reviews have called this the boldest spin-off in The Big Bang Theory franchise by far, and the finale shows why. Pulling off the meta moment took a lot of work.
The sitcom scenes were filmed outside Stage 25 on the Warner Bros. lot, where The Big Bang Theory was produced. So you’d assume they just wheeled the old comic book store back in. They didn’t.
Prady said the team had to build the set twice. One version was the single-camera store the show had used all season. The other was a multi-camera version built for the classic sitcom look.
“We didn’t use the original sets, but you’re right, we had to build. The only way to do this, because a multi-cam set looks different than a single-cam set, is we had to build the set two times. We had our single-cam comic book store that we’ve been using all season with four walls and a ceiling, and on the next stage over at Universal, they built the multi-cam version of that set and the multi-cam version of the stockroom,” Prady said.
They built a fake audience, too
The store was only part of the job. The crew also had to recreate the inside of a multi-cam soundstage itself.
“But they also had to build the interior of a multi-cam soundstage, they had to build audience risers, the sound booth and the lighting booth that sits behind the audience, the camera alley, all of those features of multi-cam stage, they had to build. Our amazing production team actually went over to Georgie and Mandy, which was in production at the time, so that they could copy it and get it right. And it was also a change for the director of photography,” Prady said.
Yes, they scouted the franchise’s other spin-off to get the fake version of their own old workplace right. (There’s something lovely about that.)
Even the cameras had to change
Prady said the shift in shooting style reached all the way down to how the cameras move.
“The camera moves in multi-cam are completely different, the cameras go onto dollies, you have dolly moves that don’t exist in single-cam, and all of that had to be duplicated. So it was a pretty, pretty complicated task,” Prady said.
The finale also leaves plenty of open questions that Stuart Fails to Save the Universe season 2 could pick up. The stage trip isn’t one of them anymore.
By all accounts, the HBO Max comedy’s team didn’t mind the extra work. Lorre said filming the season’s final moments outside the soundstage made for a “fun night.”
