• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, October 17, 2024

Welcome to the “Joanie Loves Chachi” of the 21st century.

Like that best-left-forgotten 1980s spinoff of “Happy Days,” the new CBS sitcom “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage” plucks two young characters from another hit show, “Young Sheldon,” and attempts to make a comedy out of their situation.

Set in the 1990s like its “Young Sheldon” mothership, the premiere episode of “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage” starts with some of the show’s characters in a living room watching “Frasier” on TV.

Ironically, lovable dimwit Georgie starts a conversation about sitcom laugh tracks in which he happily tells everybody that he knows a TV show is funny when he hears laughter, while apparently having no clue that the laughter he hears on TV is almost always added later.

The irony is that “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage” also has a laugh track, but unlike “Frasier,” it is not funny.

In fact, maybe I was imagining this, but the laugh track heard on “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage” was so tepid that it was as if the recorded laughter found it hard to laugh too. 

Or if the laughs were from real people such as a studio audience, then the tone of their laughter speaks for itself.

“Georgie & Mandy” tells the story of the two newlyweds from “Young Sheldon” who were married as that series, itself a prequel spinoff of “The Big Bang Theory,” came to an end last spring.

In “Young Sheldon,” Georgie (Montana Jordan) was the bird-brained older brother of Sheldon Cooper, the family genius. 

Mandy (Emily Osment) was Georgie’s girlfriend who became pregnant, hastening their marriage.

The new show takes up their story as newlyweds living in Mandy’s old bedroom with their one-year-old baby in her parent's house.

Cliché alert: Episode One has Mandy clashing with her mother, and vowing to move out, although the young couple’s finances will leave them few options.

But move out they do, to a mobile home in a trailer park. It might not be much, but it is where they will have a chance to embark on a life’s journey not unlike many others who start out with next to nothing but over time, build better lives for themselves and their families.

But Mandy’s mother has other plans. She’s a meddling shrew whose antics are on par with those of Marie Barone on “Everybody Loves Raymond,” who was perhaps the least likable, most intrusive mother in the history of television.

No sooner do Georgie and Mandy leave than her mother wants them back in order to better control their lives. 

So she adopts the strategy of insulting their new home and in the process, belittling anyone in the audience watching at home who might be living in similar circumstances.

A scene in which she turns up her nose in disgust at this first home of her daughter and son-in-law shows how odious and mean she is.

It is not as if she is some kind of countess. She and her husband, the proprietor of an auto repair shop, raised their daughter in a modest household too.

But aside from this monster mom, there is little to like generally about the premiere of “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage,” and more importantly, little to laugh at too.