Yahoo Lifestyle Georgie & Mandy EP on Shooting Young Sheldon Spinoff With an Audience — And How It’s Addressed in Premiere
Unlike Young Sheldon, which pivoted to a single-camera format, Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage is a multi-cam that shoots in front of a live, studio audience — just like The Big Bang Theory. And right up top, Thursday’s series premiere addresses the format switch head-on — and in extremely meta fashion.
In the cold open, Georgie (played by Montana Jordan) is seen watching a new episode of Frasier with Jim (Will Sasso) and Audrey (Rachel Bay Jones). As the sound of laughter resonates from their television set, Georgie turns to his in-laws and says, “Frasier’s a laughin’ show. I love laughin’ shows.” Audrey appears confused, so Georgie explains the difference between multi-cam and single-cam: “Some shows you can hear people laughin’, and some you can’t.”
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Take, for instance, The Wonder Years, a single-camera show not unlike Young Sheldon. “No one’s laughin’,” Georgie points out. “Is it funny? We’ll never know!”
As series co-creator Steve Holland explains to TVLine, “I don’t know that we felt we needed to address [the format switch] for the audience to know what was going on.” That said, “as we were talking about the show and the switch to multi-cam — which, you know, I’m not sure that there has ever been a show that went from single- to multi-cam — we knew that it was going to be a thing that people were going to have a reaction to, and it was going to be a thing that people talk about, and we just thought, ‘Why don’t we get in front of it? Let’s own it and not try to pretend like we don’t know that there’s a difference here.’ And it just seemed like a fun way, right off the bat, to say, ‘We understand. We know what we’re doing. We get it. We know this is a different. We know this is a slightly different thing than you’re used to seeing in this world, but settle in. I think you’re going to enjoy it.'”
As for how they settled on Frasier and The Wonder Years as their two examples, the EP notes that “we were looking for shows that would have been on at the time that were popular enough that people would would recognize them and know what we were talking about. We’re big Wonder Years fans — and, obviously, Wonder Years was an influence on Young Sheldon.“
During an April interview with TVLine, series star Emily Osment shared her feelings about the switch from single- to multi-cam. “I’ve paid my dues with multi-cam, and it’s so fun,” the Hannah Montana and Young & Hungry vet told us. “It’s just a completely different experience…. My favorite part of that is the live audience, and feeling like you’re doing a new play every week. I really enjoy that process.
“As much as we love our Young Sheldon crew — and they’re wonderful people to work around because they all laugh and make us feel great — there’s something different about actually performing in front of people who are there to watch you perform,” she explained. “It ignites something new in your performance, and it’s wonderful.”
More recently, during a conference call with reporters, Jordan, who’s new to the multi-camera format, discussed what it was like on his first tape night. “I didn’t know what to expect. But I didn’t know what to expect at the beginning of Young Sheldon, either,” he said, “and somehow, thank God, I got through that, so I’m going to do the best I can. Every week, we all work our butts off to bring [Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage] to life [and] I’m enjoying every bit of it. Every time that we film, it’s electric, it’s energetic, it’s awesome… it’s really fun.”
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