As Stuart Fails to Save the Universe concludes its reflective, oddly quiet season finale “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience”, watching its characters walk off the CBS studio lot where a multi-camera of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe is being filmed, the 2012 Arcade Fire song “Sprawl II” begins to play:
“They heard me singing and they told me to stop
Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
These days, my life, I feel it has no purpose”
After ten episodes of stumbling their way through a half-dozen different universes, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe turns and looks inward in “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience”, an episode that feels less a satisfying season finale to the strange creative experiment (of what is easily The Big Bang Theory‘s most interesting spin-off), and more like a reflection on the state of the television industry as a whole, particularly for the sitcom format that has defined Lorre’s legacy over the four decades of his career. As a season finale, “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience” is a rather ineffective shrug; but as a reflective piece of art unto itself, “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience” is an incredibly poignant, if incredibly depressing, bit of introspection, a finale both considering its place in the current television landscape, and what its sheer existence may means for the very future of TV itself.
The first half of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe‘s season finale stumbles a bit as it tries to marry its aesthetics with those of its predecessor, as Kripke and other characters slowly becoming aware of the sudden shifts in the comic book shop (which, as Kyle explains to us, exists nowhere; “You know somewhere? This isn’t that”). Though the construction of this is fun – a bit of an observation on the nature of sitcoms as existing in an abstract of the time its set, reflecting a world that exists while also being a strange, brightly-lit facsimile of it – “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience”, when it really starts to get interesting is when everyone stops looking around at the sound of canned audience laughter, and considers the possibility of perspective: the delivery people that come and leave from nowhere, the lack of tangible space between the living room and bedroom – and of course, the fact that they seemingly now exist out of space and time itself.
From there, “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Audience” stops being about its science fiction story, stops caring about Stuart’s attempts to become a hero or undo the critical, world-breaking mistake he’s made; when Stuart Fails to Save the Universe‘s camera turns around, breaking the fourth wall to reveal nothing but a smokescreen, “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Audience” makes a conscious choice to move from the literal to the metaphorical – which is why it makes perfect sense the season ends with the characters watching the actors playing them, before wandering out of the studio into the cold, dark unknown of CBS Studios’ parking lot.
It’s a rather depressing ending, honestly: Stuart Fails to Save the Universe ends its season on a reflection of the never-ending mill of rehashed content that comprises much of today’s television landscape. If something isn’t a spinoff, reboot, retelling, adaptation, or “reimagining”, does it even make it to air? As the finale contemplates the show it has built around one of The Big Bang Theory‘s recurring characters (and three of its many, many, many minor recurring characters), one can’t help but the self-awareness of its characters becomes a reflection on what is “creative”, and what happens an omnipotent creature of its own creation (sound familiar?) takes over humanity’s decisions for itself. Like watching a tsunami hit the shores from an opulent beach house a few hundred feet in, “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Audience” smartly conflates the Age of Reboots and the potential end of creativity itself with the widespread adoption of heartless, soulless artificial intelligence.
Though its characters are contemplative, and ultimately hopeful, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe ends on an incredibly depressing reflection, as a group of experienced creatives contend with the fact that, in a world where everything is driven by share prices and AI, there’s little room to experiment, to explore – and most importantly, to fail. When failure no longer becomes an option, what is left? Nothing but recycled, soulless and safe attempts to recapture a magic long since expired; in a lot of ways, “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Audience” has a rather incendiary sense of identity, considering itself as a series that could perpetually exist in an infinite number of forms (goofy troupe travels through time and space), but only gets a chance to if it tethers itself to known intellectual property – not only pigeonholing the performers it brings back to their previous roles, but from allowing its writers to do something truly creative and different. “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Audience” suggests we are dangerously close to losing that – and in its most acerbic moment, walks its characters off the studio lot to suggest that the old, safe ways of sitcoms with laugh tracks and sci-fi series with cool premises and little logic are gone forever.
Depressed yet? Though its arguable how “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Audience” operates as a conclusive chapter to the first season of Stuart’s time-traveling, alternate-girlfriend banging adventures around the edges of the Warner Bros. multiverse, it’s undeniable how hauntingly effective it is in the third act, when it turns the camera inward to consider just how quickly things havre fundamentally changed – and more importantly, how desperate showrunners, writers, and performers alike are dying to break away from the model of the past decade, and dare to do something, anything different than the constant consolidation and stripping of the art form fans and creative have been subject to in recent years.
Though it doesn’t present itself as a harsh critique, there’s a certain depressed resignation under the surface of “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Audience” that is undeniable – and understandable, as a spinoff series on a streaming network, one with an uncertain future following yet another consolidation of power and capital in the entertainment industry (honestly – odds are 50/50 we even see the greenlit version of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, something this finale clearly is contending with). But underneath that veneer of sadness, lies a great reverence for television as an art form (which, having spent 15 years writing about it, I can certainly vibe with) and a nugget of hope that maybe, just maybe this weird, IP-obsessed path we’re heading down might lead us to something else interesting and new – at the very least, we are still telling stories written by humans (for now), and as long as we have that, even the bleakest nights still appear to have their day.
I certainly didn’t expect Stuart Fails to Save the Universe‘s season finale to provide any answers or closure; the first nine episodes couldn’t care less, and I appreciate how the show mostly sticks to its guns here. How it is able to do so, by becoming a much larger, more meaningfully personal resolution on the dire state of television, is certainly going to be more debated amongst the audience; though it is an incredibly dour prescription of what’s to come, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe‘s final moments suggest that while we all may be forever sprawling in the crawl, so to speak, if we can still find art to connect to, it can still surprise and move us in ways that give life meaning – AI may eventually destroy and reduce us to nothing, but as long as we continue on that journey to find truth in life, we can at least go down with a smile on our faces and our friends at our sides. A depressing message, but one I think we can all get behind.
Other thoughts/observations:
- And that’s a wrap on season one of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe! Long as we’re still here, I’ll be back for season two, whenever it may air.
- Happy birthday Denise!
- Yes, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe‘s opening credits are obviously AI-generated – so how can the antagonist of the series be an analogue for AI, you might ask? Considering the slow death of the opening credit sequence the past 20 years, I think we have all the anecdotal evidence we need to figure this one out, folks.
- Bert only eats dumpling skins: “Would you eat my insides?”
- no big cameos in the season finale! Honestly, may be the biggest surprise of them all.
- “Are we dead?” “… or maybe we were never real?”