How Big Bang Theory’s new spin-off sought to defy the “Skip Intro” button

When it came time to develop the opening credits for the Big Bang Theory spin-off Stuart Fails To Save The Universe, sitcom titan Chuck Lorre was hesitant. He didn’t want to expend too much effort on something that has a “Skip Intro” button slapped atop it.

“Nobody watches them after the first episode or two, so it seems like a waste of money and time and creativity,” explains Lorre, who co-created Stuart Fails with his Big Bang co-creator Bill Prady and X-Men: The Last Stand screenwriter Zak Penn.

Lorre, though, is always game to push the limits of the sitcom form. Consider the premise of the latest addition to the Big Bang universe, which finds fifth bananas Stuart (Kevin Sussman), Denise (Lauren Lapkus), Bert (Brian Posehn), and Kripke (John Ross Bowie) attempting to repair reality after the show’s titular comic-book-store owner breaks a quantum device and unleashes a multiverse. With the quartet finding themselves in a new, far-out version of their world every week, Lorre, Prady, and Penn wrote a credits sequence to match—one that not only “talks” to the viewer by way of witty onscreen text, but also changes with each new episode.   

The opening credits for the series premiere, for example, place a “DO NOT SKIP!” message directly over the “Skip Intro” button. Why? “You’ll be missing out,” a billboard explains. A divider tab in a comic book bin then asks, “HOW ABOUT THESE GRAPHICS?,” after which the cover of a Superman comic remarked, “NOT BAD CONSIDERING WE HAD LIKE NO MONEY IN THE BUDGET.” The second episode’s intro continues the conversation—“Once again, thank you for not pressing ‘skip intro.’”—after which a billboard sign and a new fortune cookie hyped the “COMPLETELY DIFFERENT” second episode. A doormat and a safety placard then allude to a grandparent’s Yiddish adage.

Each credits sequence ends with the Stuart Fails logo situated atop a spoiler that doubles as the episode title. In the premiere, it foretells a character’s death; others tease a cameo, and a wedding, or a heads up that the writers were denied the use of a certain DC Comics superhero.   

“We wanted to create some value to the opening credits, where you wouldn’t dream of skipping it,” Lorre says. “What we came up with was, ‘Hey, let’s try reading!’”

The initial idea was entirely text-based. But ultimately, Prady recalls, “it was [post-production co-producer] Ashley Korman who said, ‘Let’s see if there’s a way to do text with visuals,’” hence the billboard, fortune cookie, and other objects like a milkpail “A lot of the work in figuring out how to do this came from Ashley,” notes Prady. “She shepherded this as we figured it out on the fly.”

Streaming TV has long had a love/hate relationship with opening credits. The lack of a fixed “time slot” affords a show the opportunity to not rush things and serve up the sort of elaborate, eloquent sequence that broadcast and cable previously realized was a luxury taking up time that could go to commercials. Game Of Thrones, Peacemaker, Severance, and Pachinko are but a few of the series that have winningly leaned into opening credits that draw you in each and every time, either by way of engaging visuals or a real ear worm of a theme song. 

But then there’s that handy off-ramp for the impatient, the Skip Intro button. The supernatural drama Evil, which for most of its run streamed on Paramount+, was one of the first series to have some fun with said escape hatch by “warning” viewers that “YOU WILL BE HAUNTED” (or subject to other fearsome fates) if Skip Intro was employed. The creators of Stuart Fails—none of whom say they were familiar with Evil’s devilish approach — took that notion a lot further.