While Young Sheldon is far from the most shocking sitcom on television, The Big Bang Theory spinoff did land itself in hot water back in 2019 thanks to an ill-advised sound effect. Young Sheldon is hardly the most scandalous show currently on the air. While every sitcom has its detractors, viewers are unlikely to find anything offensive or shocking in The Big Bang Theory spinoff when compared to the foul-mouthed antics of South Park’s stars or the amoral activities of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia's central gang.
However, Young Sheldon can boast an ignominious accolade that The Big Bang Theory never managed to pull off. Although The Big Bang Theory did receive its fair share of FCC complaints for the show’s use of mild language and its euphemistic references to sex, the earlier sitcom was never threatened with a fine from the Federal Communications Commission. Thanks to one season 3 episode, Young Sheldon cannot claim the same.
In 2019, the FCC proposed a massive $272,000 fine for “A Mother, A Child, and A Blue Man’s Backside” (season 1, episode 18), a Young Sheldon episode that used a tornado warning sound effect that sounded too close to the real thing. While this may seem like a high price for The Big Bang Theory spinoff, Young Sheldon did command a huge share of the audience at the time. The episode in question was viewed by a whopping 11.7 million people, meaning the FCC’s fear of viewers getting “alert fatigue” from misleading uses of real-life emergency alert tones (or extremely similar soundalikes) was understandable. However, it is not clear whether Young Sheldon’s creators were forced to pay the fine in full.
Did Young Sheldon Have To Pay An FCC Fine?
The fine against Young Sheldon was a proposed measure and there are no follow-up stories to indicate that the network had to shell out the high price tag, although the move likely influenced other TV shows and future episodes of Young Sheldon to be careful about emergency sound effects (which was the intended purpose of the measure). While later Young Sheldon episodes featured darker plots that were more likely to prompt complaints from the FCC regarding heavy thematic content, The Big Bang Theory spinoff never misused anything that sounded like an emergency alert tone again. Ironically, it would have been relatively easy for Young Sheldon to avoid this issue compared to many other television shows since, as the spinoff is set in the 80s, Young Sheldon didn’t need to use a contemporary emergency alert tone as part of the show’s tornado plot.
While many more dramatic television shows could reasonably complain that an inability to utilize real-life emergency alert tones affects the verisimilitude of the series, Young Sheldon’s status as a light-hearted sitcom set in the 80s made the misuse of the sound harder to excuse. That said, as Young Sheldon season 6 arrives, it looks unlikely that the sitcom will ever be likely to repeat its run-in with the FCC. However, the question of whether The Big Bang Theory spinoff ever had to pay for its mistakes is one that only the Young Sheldon creators can know for sure.