Zoe Perry’s Mary Cooper is getting a lot of screentime in Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage Season 2, as the show tackles everything from her continuing feud with Audrey McCallister to her pursuit of love after George Sr.’s death. It’s been a treat for Perry to return for the new show after Young Sheldon, based on comments she’s made. Interestingly, though, she recently referenced Roseanne to explain how working on the spinoff and the OG series aren’t quite the same.
During an interview with TVLine, Perry spoke about Mary’s journey in G&M Season 2, as well as what it’s like to reprise the role for the CBS sitcom after spending years playing the character on Young Sheldon. The latest episode, specifically, showed more of the Cooper household, which served as the main setting for the original series. That said, it’s just a reconstruction of the original set, which the actress noted is very noticeable to her in a way it may not be to fans:
Being on those sets, they’re familiar, and then there’s also aspects of them that are different because we’re shooting a multi-cam here, so the dimensions have to be a bit different. We had the luxury on ‘Young Sheldon’ of basically filming in what felt like a real house, you know?
Because Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage is a multi-cam comedy shot in front of a live audience, the sets are more like a theater stage and less like the home setting Zoe Perry spoke of. That would definitely throw me off, especially if some of the sets still looked more or less the same as the previous ones.
Perry used Roseanne to describe the difference, which I love for obvious reasons. Her mother, Laurie Metcalf, starred on the series as Roseanne’s sister Jackie, so it tracks that Perry has seen the show and would reference one of its episodes to explain how she feels while acting on the set of Georgie & Mandy:
It reminds me of an old ‘Roseanne’ tag where an older DJ — played by John Goodman — was rocking back and forth in an insane asylum saying, ‘They say she’s the same, but she’s not the same,’ about the two Beckys. It feels a little like that. They say it’s the same, but it’s not the same.For TV, it looks exactly the same, but when you inhabit the space and look out, you realize you’re on a different stage. It’s like a homecoming, but also different.
It feels more like she’s describing a concept from an episode of The Twilight Zone, but I’ll take the comparison to Roseanne all the same. That’s especially since Zoe Perry inherited the role of Mary Cooper from her mother, who played the older iteration of Sheldon’s mom in The Big Bang Theory.
Mary and Missy appear in Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage the most out of Georgie’s family members, and fans are waiting to see whether or not Iain Armitage will show up as Sheldon again. So far, we’ve only gotten mentions of the character here and there, which is on brand, considering Georgie mentioned on The Big Bang Theory that Sheldon wasn’t around much after his father’s death.
I do hope we get to see Sheldon appear on the spinoff eventually, especially so we can see how Mary treats him compared to her other children. Mary has always been softer with Sheldon than with her other children, and I think, as they get older, that would only become more apparent in this show. I’d love to see how Missy and Georgie feel about that and if it would lead them to resent their genius brother because of it.
Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage will close out its time on the 2025 TV schedule with two episodes on CBS on Thursday, December 19th at 8:00 p.m. ET. Enjoy these new episodes, because once they’re done, we’ll have to wait until February 26th for more.
