Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage had a great first holiday episode, but that's the only one we can expect for the rest of 2024. It's a bummer as someone who wondered if we'd see Sheldon Cooper appear after he wasn't at Thanksgiving, but after hearing why it isn't happening, I'm content with waiting on that and other potential cameos to happen somewhere on the 2025 TV schedule.
EP Steve Holland spoke to TV Insider about the CBS sitcom and what the status of the Christmas episode was. Holland confirmed Season 1 will not feature Georgie and Mandy celebrating Christmas together, and the Thanksgiving episode was part of the reason why. As he put it:
We’ve done the Thanksgiving episode, which was great and it felt like going into Christmas…sometimes it’s hard to do those episodes and not have the whole family come in.
Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage brought many family members to its Turkey Day affair, including Craig T. Nelson's Dale. While the Cooper family and other characters from Young Sheldon will occasionally be in the series from time to time, they're not series regulars. As such, it was likely easier to skip Christmas in the show rather than pulling a similar batch of actors right back into the mix.
Sure, the writing staff could've concocted a reason why the Cooper family wasn't fully reunited for the holidays that would've made sense and allowed the McAllisters plus Georgie to celebrate alone. Steve Holland explained why they didn't go that route, and how tackling both holidays during Season 1 might've hurt the Thanksgiving episode in retrospect, saying:
If you’re gonna do Christmas, and it’s Cece’s [first] Christmas, how do you not have Mary and Meemaw as a part of it? And we had just had them in for Thanksgiving and it felt like it might be treading similar ground thematically. So we chose Thanksgiving because it was sort of the first big holiday without George Sr.
If I had to choose between watching the Coopers eat Thanksgiving dinner at George Sr.'s grave or him making a cameo as a ghost in a Christmas episode, I'd go with the former. Not that the latter was even an option, but given everything that Holland said, it sounds like doing a Christmas episode right on the back of doing a Thanksgiving episode would've felt very similar, which is why they opted out of it..
I can also imagine there will be other opportunities for the show to celebrate Christmas, as CBS gave Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage a full-season order after its first two episodes. Given the success of The Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon, I would imagine we'll all be watching this third entry in the franchise, be it on CBS or with a Paramount+ subscription, for a long time.
While it may be going easy on the holiday episodes, Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage has given us plenty of reasons to speculate on why things between these two ultimately fell apart. I've mentioned struggles between the couple and Georgie's potential falling out with his father-in-law as possible factors so far, and I expect to see even more reasons by the end of Season 1.
Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage airs on CBS on Thursdays at 8:00 p.m. ET. I can't wait to see some new episodes after this break following the Thanksgiving episode, and while there are no Christmas antics on the way, I'm sure I'll still be entertained by what's to come.
