“Young Sheldon” cast was ‘pissed’ at ‘lack of transparency’ around Georgie and Mandy’s spinoff, new book reveals

Kat PettiboneWed, October 21, 2026 at 11:30 AM UTC

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‘Young Sheldon’ castCredit: Pamela Littky/CBS via GettyKey Points -

The cast of Young Sheldon found out there would be a spinoff, titled Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, while filming the show’s final season, a new book reveals.

Showrunner Steve Holland says star Raegan Revord’s mom, Holly Revord, wouldn’t “speak” to him for “months” after learning the news through the grapevine.

“There’s some people who were pissed,” Raegan’s costar, Lance Barber, admitted.

The end of Young Sheldon marked a new chapter for some members of its longtime cast — but a blindsiding goodbye for others.

After six successful seasons, the stars of the hit CBS series found out during a 2023 Zoom call with co-creators and showrunners Steve Holland, Chuck Lorre, and Steve Molaro that season 7 would be the show’s last. Ten minutes later, Montana Jordan and Emily Osment received a call from Lorre informing them that their characters, Georgie, Sheldon’s goofy but lovable older brother, and Mandy, an older woman he accidentally impregnated during a one-night stand, would be getting their own multi-camera spinoff.

While that meant bringing some of the Young Sheldon cast over to the new series, it also meant others would be saying goodbye to the characters they had played for more than seven years. Even worse: The cast hadn’t been informed of Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage during that initial Young Sheldon Zoom meeting, instead learning the news through the grapevine after returning to set for season 7. Suffice to say, not everyone was pleased.

Among the unsettled was Holly Revord, mom of star Raegan Revord, who played Sheldon’s (Iain Armitage) twin sister, Missy Cooper.

“Holly didn’t speak to me for probably two months,” Holland says in Jessica Radloff’s new Young Sheldon tell-all book. “She just wouldn’t speak to me. I was texting her, saying, ‘If you want to sit down and talk, I’m happy to sit down and explain to you how all this went down.’ And she just didn’t. And then we finally did, and she was like, ‘I just felt no one was telling me anything.’ I said, ‘I tried to, but you wouldn’t talk to me!’ Literally for two months she would glare at me and walk the other way.”

Raegan Revord as Missy Cooper on ‘Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage’Credit: Sonja Flemming/CBS via Getty

While Holly claims in the book that Holland is being “dramatic” in his recollection — “I’m from the South, we have manners,” she quips — she admits that there was a coolness toward him.

“I definitely walked the other way! I don’t know about the glare part,” she tells Radloff. “We avoided each other. Just like Molaro avoided everyone when he came out of the writers’ room.”

Holly does recall texting “back and forth” with Holland about the spinoff, but adds that their conversations would ultimately just go in “circles.” That led to her needing time before she was really “ready” to approach him.

“I felt like he was probably in a position where he couldn’t say what he wanted to say,” she says in the book, noting that the pair did “eventually” sit down to talk. “Because I didn’t want this to end and regret not having a conversation with him. I think we do have a good friendship and I value that, and I think that’s probably why I was so hurt. When you’re on these shows, everyone’s like, ‘We’re a family, we’re a family!’ but when this happened, it felt like the curtain was pulled back, and I realized, ‘We’re a business.’ And that was hard.”

Holly says that the situation “opened” Raegan’s eyes too, which was a hard pill to swallow. “The mama bear in me, seeing your child hurting, and the mishandling of it after, saying, ‘We’re family, we’re family,’ it just didn’t feel like they cared.”

Armitage’s mom, Lee Armitage, tells Radloff that the effort to hide the spinoff from the larger cast — including the younger stars’ parents, who then found out through whispers behind the scenes — felt unfair, causing tension at the start of season 7.

“The lack of transparency there wasn’t kind or thoughtful, but I understand that they didn’t know they had a new show unless they made that phone call and the actors agreed to it,” Lee explains. “And it meant that when we came back to set, everyone was on a different plane.”

It wasn’t just the parents who were frustrated by the lack of transparency. Annie Potts, who portrayed fan favorite Meemaw, was “furious” for a “long time,” Holland says.

“I think if they had been able to say, ‘We’re going to be spinning off, and these are the characters we’ll be spinning off… it doesn’t mean we don’t love you all, but this is where we want to go creatively next,’” Potts explains of her disappointment in the book. She adds that while she understood the decision to move back to a multi-camera format, Young Sheldon’s cancellation came as a “blow” to an actor of her age. (Potts is 73.)

The award-winning actress was also surprised to discover her character wasn’t a series regular fit for Georgie & Mandy, considering her close connection to the now-married pair.

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“And I guess, especially since the last two years of Sheldon, they set me up with bringing Georgie into the gambling room, and then they brought Emily in, and Mandy was living with Meemaw, so I was a little surprised that I wouldn’t have a [regular] place in the new show,” she confesses. “I felt devalued. It’s like [they were saying], ‘It was fun to have you in this, but we don’t really need you in that because you don’t bring all that much to the party.’ So, being entirely honest, I will confess to having those sinking feelings of, like, just not feeling that worthwhile.”

While Potts confirms that she was told “they were hoping some of the Sheldon family would pop by once in a while,” that didn’t feel like a very “generous invitation” at the time. “Like, ‘Oh gosh, that sounds really great,’” she quips. (Potts has since reprised the role on Georgie & Mandy in a guest star capacity.)

Lance Barber, who played Sheldon’s father, George Sr. — a character whose death was foreshadowed for years, thanks to flagship series The Big Bang Theory — agreed that the secrecy was the problem.

“When Montana and Emily were called, and nobody else knew at the time, I think that landed on people differently,” he tells Radloff, admitting there were “some people who were pissed.”

“It did feel like salt in the wound for people once the news was confirmed,” he adds.

As for Osment, she tells Radloff that the creators didn’t want to “hurt feelings,” which led to keeping Georgie & Mandy on the down low. The news leaking behind the scenes, however, also added complications for her and Jordan.

“I think they did the best they could, and it sucks that it leaked so early, because Montana and I were like, ‘We don’t want anybody to know [about the spinoff]; we’re still working on Young Sheldon. We don’t want to complicate it,’” she says in the book. “And that’s what was so great about joining Young Sheldon in the first place, is they are so tight-knit.”

Despite people’s frustrations, Holland isn’t sure whether he, Lorre, or Molaro would change how they did things if given the chance.

Annie Potts as Meemaw on ‘Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage’Credit: Robert Voets/CBS

“We felt it wasn’t appropriate to tell the cast right away. I mean, what were we going to do? Assemble them and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to do this spinoff with just these characters?’ That felt like an odd thing to say,” he explains. “But also, it wasn’t officially done yet, and it felt jinxy to say, ‘Hey, we’ve got this other show we’re doing,’ when those deals aren’t done yet. So we were waiting until they were done, and then we were going to have a meeting to talk about the spinoff.”

That said, he understands that Young Sheldon was a “huge part” of the cast’s lives, and it couldn’t have been easy to have it all end so “abruptly.”

“No one likes not being invited to the next party. That’s also hard,” he says.

Luckily, Holland feels like everyone eventually got “excited” about the new series, thanks to their universal love for Jordan. And as for the creators, it felt like Sheldon heading off to college was the right time to end things.

“Even as we were talking about season 8, we were like, ‘Is there a version that’s like Malcolm in the Middle where the older brother was away at military school and you would do little stories? Do we do that with Sheldon at Caltech?’” Holland recalls. “But you know he ends up there and you know the group of friends he ends up with. There was nothing that was going to be fun about inventing a separate group of friends before [The Big Bang Theory’s] Leonard and Wolowitz and Raj.”

Young Sheldon: The (Juicier-Than-Meemaw’s-Brisket) Inside Story of the Hit Comedy is out now.

on Entertainment Weekly

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”