Review: 'Stuart Fails to Save the Universe' is an out-of-this-world comedy

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Set us as preferred Next to the return of the doves to the backyard, nothing has made me happier recently than tumbling through the 10 episodes of the first season of “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe,” the third spin-off from “The Big Bang Theory.” Premiering Thursday on HBO Max — the first straying of the franchise from CBS, and taking advantage of the expressive opportunities premium cable affords — violence and language mostly — which does not make it any whit less adorable.(Nobody gets naked, which would make it less adorable.)Like “Lou Grant” extracting a newspaper drama from the remains of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” or the earlier “Big Bang” prequel “Young Sheldon,” “Stuart” takes its players — secondary characters in the original — and places them somewhere quite different: a single-camera, parallel-realities science-fiction adventure comedy.

Temperamentally akin to Kevin Feige’s oddball Marvel confections for Disney+, or the metafictional DC-based “Doom Patrol” (also on HBO Max, for what it’s worth), it was created and written by Chuck Lorre with “Big Bang” co-creator Bill Prady, along with Zak Penn, whose screenwriting credits involve mostly superheroes and sci-fi, appropriately enough.(Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain — Lorre, that is — posting a message in the ever-changing credits that “comedy isn’t written by emotionally healthy people” and, in dialogue, likening a sitcom to “a meaningless void.”)Our protagonists here are comic shop owner Stuart Bloom (Kevin Sussman), not the schlemiel he can seem; his able, practical girlfriend Denise (Lauren Lapkus); sweet geologist Bert Kibbler (Brian Posehn, exquisitely deadpan); and troublesome plasma physicist Barry Kripke (John Ross Bowie).

They are not the first four actors, or characters, o...