(Bloomberg) -- You could be forgiven for wondering if the characters in The Big Bang Theory universe have been on television since the dawn of time. The show, from old-school comedic mastermind Chuck Lorre, centered around a group of nerdy, socially awkward scientists and premiered on CBS in 2007. According to Nielsen ratings, it was the No. 1 comedy for nine years.
The series concluded in 2019, but the network already had a replacement. The prequel, Young Sheldon, which follows the childhood of Big Bang Theory protagonist Sheldon Cooper, began airing in 2017 and ran for 141 episodes. It’s been the No. 1 comedy on TV since Big Bang ended. The last episode in May drew a colossal-for-2024 11.7 million viewers. (At its 2011-12 peak, Two and a Half Men, another Lorre hit, averaged 15 million a week.)
This fall, yet another spinoff arrives in the form of Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage. Premiering Oct. 17, it’s billed as a heartwarming comedy that follows the ups and downs of Sheldon’s older brother (Georgie) and his wife as they raise a daughter and grapple with a 12-year age difference. The plot thickens as Georgie rises to success selling tires in Texas.
For CBS’s fall premieres across categories, you’ll see the network sticking to what it knows best: familiar characters recycled from other series and formulaic storylines. When it first airs Oct. 14, NCIS: Origins will be the fifth offshoot of the NCIS franchise, joining spinoffs in Los Angeles, New Orleans, Hawaii and Sydney. This time, the action series about Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents explores the early career of the original show’s protagonist, Leroy Jethro Gibbs. (Baby boomer Mark Harmon is now embodied by hunky millennial Austin Stowell.)
There’s also a Matlock reboot starring Kathy Bates that premieres Sept. 22. Another new show, Watson, takes its inspiration from Sherlock Holmes and stars Morris Chestnut as Holmes’ famous partner—only this time, Holmes is dead, and Watson solves medical mysteries.
That’s a lot of known quantities. “We recognize how much our audience loves and invests in the characters on air, and that gives us a direction to move towards,” says Amy Reisenbach, president of CBS Entertainment.
The fall slate comes at a tricky time for Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS and other networks such as MTV. Chief Executive Officer Bob Bakish stepped down in April and was replaced by the “Office of the CEO,” a trio of executives that includes CBS President George Cheeks. In July, controlling shareholder Shari Redstone accepted a proposal to sell her family’s interest in Paramount to David Ellison, son of Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison.
Paramount has been working to trim $500 million in costs and bolster its struggling Paramount+ streaming service, which trails Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Max in number of subscribers—not to mention Netflix, which serves almost 270 million customers, more than triple the count of Paramount+.
The yearslong success of CBS, however, has provided some rare reliability. The network aired 13 of the top 20 broadcast series in 2023. And for the last 16 seasons, it has been the most-watched network in the US. Tracker, which begins its second season Oct. 27, was the top-rated nonsports show on television, averaging 11.6 million viewers per episode. Starring Justin Hartley as survivalist Colter Shaw, who uses his tracking skills to solve mysteries, it premiered after the 2024 Super Bowl and scored 18.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen.
This means a lot for Paramount. Broadcast and cable TV delivered $5.2 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2024, 68% of the company’s total. “The corporate office may not be very stable right now, but the programming of CBS—you know what to expect,” says media consultant Brad Adgate, who’s spent more than 35 years in the industry at companies including Turner Broadcasting and Comcast Spotlight.
Shows such as Tracker rely on tried-and-true plot structures to placate the network’s remaining audience following continued cord-cutting, according to Adgate. Nielsen found in May that streaming accounted for a record 39% of TV viewership, while cable made up 28%.
But in a surprise twist, shows like NCIS and Big Bang Theory are also being embraced on streaming by those very same young people who’ve cut their cords. Young Sheldon reruns air on TBS and Nick at Nite, following the old TV model—first on broadcast, then syndication on cable. But previous seasons are also on Netflix and Max. Audiences watched 6 billion minutes of Young Sheldon in May, according to Nielsen, half of it on streaming and half on traditional TV.
This is a big shift that’s happened in the past couple of years, where media companies have folded their gamble on streaming platform exclusivity and started licensing to everyone through deals that have not only brought in cash but also broadened viewership. “It was interesting and gratifying that Young Sheldon, when it went to streaming, especially when it went to Netflix, kind of found this whole new audience,” says Steve Holland, a writer on that show who’s moved on to developing Georgie & Mandy.
Spinoffs like these allow networks to save money while boosting audience numbers across all shows within a franchise, according to Brandon Katz, senior entertainment industry strategist at research firm Parrot Analytics Ltd. “Viewers will consume that spinoff and then go back to the original, so you have pingponging audience interest,” Katz says.
Like The Big Bang Theory, Georgie & Mandy will be filmed in front of a live audience using multiple cameras, a format that Young Sheldon didn’t follow. It’s a setup unfamiliar to some Gen Zers who grew up with single-camera shows on streaming, but like its predecessors, Georgie & Mandy’s humor is designed to appeal to multiple generations.
Viewers can expect some fresh creativity, too: With Young Sheldon, the writers had to stick with facts that were already established in The Big Bang Theory, such as the untimely death of Sheldon’s father. Georgie and Mandy’s relationship wasn’t explored much on The Big Bang Theory, giving writers some more freedom. What we do know is that they both lied about their ages during a romance on Young Sheldon that resulted in an unplanned pregnancy while Georgie was still a teenager.
But the rest? Well, it’s still unwritten. “We can kind of tell any story,” Holland says, “and it can go in almost any direction.”
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