For eleven years Stuart Bloom stood behind a counter in Pasadena selling comics to other people’s protagonists. On 23 July he became one. Stuart Fails to Save the Universe arrived on HBO Max with ten episodes, no laugh track and a broken multiverse to repair, and the promotion is more interesting than the plot.
The long apprenticeship of a supporting player
Stuart walked into The Big Bang Theory in its second season, in an episode called The Hofstadter Isotope, as the owner of a comic shop the four leads used as a clubhouse. Kevin Sussman played him as a man permanently braced for disappointment, and the writers used that posture as a pressure valve. When a joke needed a target who would not fight back, Stuart was standing right there.
His billing tells the story of how ensemble television actually works. Sussman was made a series regular in season six, dropped back to recurring by the end of that same season, then restored to the main cast in season eight. Few things describe the economics of a hit sitcom more precisely than an actor being promoted, demoted and promoted again while the audience notices none of it.
That yo-yo is the ordinary condition of the supporting player. The leads carry the marketing and the salary negotiations. Everyone else exists to make the world feel inhabited, and their security depends on whether a given season needs a fourth voice in the room.
What the shop was for
The comic shop earned its place by solving a structural problem. A sitcom built around four flats and a lift needs somewhere else to go, and a room full of long boxes and action figures gave the writers a location where the characters could be enthusiasts rather than colleagues. Stuart came with the set, which is a modest way to enter a series and a durable one.
He was also the show’s only working artist. He had been to art school, he drew, he failed to make a living at it, and the series treated that failure as a running joke rather than a subject. Anyone who has tried to keep a creative practice going alongside a shop, a studio or a second job may find the joke lands differently now.
The new job description
The spin-off hands him a device. Stuart damages a machine built by Sheldon Cooper, Leonard Hofstadter and Howard Wolowitz, sets off what the series calls a multiverse Armageddon, and has to travel between worlds putting it right. Lauren Lapkus plays Denise, Brian Posehn returns as the geologist Bert Kibbler and John Ross Bowie appears as Barry Kripke, including a version of him who has done rather well for himself in another reality.
Chuck Lorre, Zak Penn and Bill Prady created the series. The presentation breaks with the parent show in ways that matter more than the mythology:
single camera instead of the multi-camera stage, so the visual grammar is closer to a film than a sitcom
no laugh track, which removes the safety net the original never went without
a theme by Danny Elfman and a score by Joseph LoDuca, both of them genre composers rather than comedy hands
ten episodes released weekly rather than a full drop, keeping the show in conversation until late September
The verdict so far
Reviews have landed in the middle. The series holds 76 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes from 38 reviews with an average of 6.9 out of 10, and 68 out of 100 on Metacritic from 18 critics. That is a respectable position for a franchise extension and a modest one for a show with this much money behind it.
The dissent is worth reading. In The Hollywood Reporter, Angie Han called the world-building slapdash and argued that the series treats its female characters as prizes, which is a serious charge against a comedy that wants credit for growing up. RogerEbert.com concluded that a clever concept had been wasted. Neither review complains that Sussman cannot carry it.
Why the casting decision is the story
Franchise extensions usually promote the character with the largest fanbase, because the arithmetic is safer. Stuart has no fanbase in that sense. He has recognition, which is different, and a quality that most leads are not allowed to have: he is unembarrassed about being unimpressive.
That makes him a strange fit for a hero narrative and a good fit for a comic one. The premise only works if the man sent to save every universe is manifestly the wrong person for it, and eleven years of standing at the till is exactly the qualification the joke requires.
For anyone who has spent years in a supporting role, in any industry, the pleasure here is not the multiverse. It is watching the person who was hired to react finally be given something to do, and discovering that the skills turn out to be transferable after all.
Stuart Fails to Save the Universe streams weekly on HBO Max until 24 September.
Photograph: Kevin Sussman by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
