With the rise of people mostly turning to streaming platforms to watch TV shows, I feel like I’ve seen a decline in the popularity of a lot of regular network TV shows. Still, one show that I kept hearing about is NBC’s show This Is Us, and so I figured it might be worth a watch. I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting into when I started it, but I just always remember hearing that it’s a very emotional show. I was prepared for that, and yet This Is Us still managed to knock me on my ass more times than I can count in its first 18-episode season. I figured I was going to like the show, but this first season is way better than I ever expected.
This Is Us is a family drama, but it’s one that has a much different method of storytelling than I’m used to. It shows us the Pearson family over multiple timelines. I think it would be easiest to talk about the story by telling you about the characters first. There are five members of the Pearson family that we focus on. There is the father and mother, Jack and Rebecca. In the first episode of the show, we see Rebecca deliver triplets that she’s pregnant with. However, one of the triplets dies in childbirth, leaving only Kate and Kevin. To make up for the loss of one child, Jack and Rebecca take home an abandoned baby from the hospital, and adopt him as their third child, Randall.
The show has a “present day” timeline, where we focus on the lives of the three children, who are turning 36 at the start of the series. In this timeline, we see the struggles of the three in their daily lives. Kate is very obese and is trying to deal with all of her weight issues, both in terms of her self-love and also actually losing the weight. Kevin is a famous actor on a popular sitcom, but is starting to feel unfulfilled in a show that’s just objectifying him, so he begins to seek some more serious acting roles that will bring him fulfillment. And Randall tracks down his biological father, and must confront his feelings of abandonment and work towards creating a relationship with his father, who he quickly finds out is dying from cancer.
That is the main timeline that we explore storylines for the three kids, but with Jack and Rebecca it’s much more complicated. We see their lives from multiple different points in time. We see things early on in their relationship, right when they have the kids, when the kids are about 9 years old, and when they’re teenagers. I’m not sure how the show manages to jump between all of these different timelines without being confusing or feeling scattered, but it handles it with grace.
The thing that I love about This Is Us above all else is that its characters are actually good people. There are so many times in family dramas where the only way the show can think to make things interesting is to have its characters act terribly towards each other, but This Is Us somehow manages to create really compelling drama without sacrificing the purity of its characters. Don’t get me wrong, the characters do have their flaws, but it’s more of temperamental flaws, rather than them just acting terribly. I’ve seen characters just yell at each other and sleep around and do other things like that just to create drama on a show, but those sorts of things rarely happen on this show. For how emotional this show can get, it never feels too melodramatic for the sake of it.
This creates an interesting atmosphere for the show that I don’t experience in a lot of other shows of its kind. To make a comic book analogy, this is kind of the “Superman” of family dramas. What I mean by that is that its characters are constantly trying to be better people, but outside forces constantly get in their way. When I see Jack and Rebecca’s relationship on-screen, I always feel like I’m watching a relationship that I aspire to have. I rarely get this in dramatic shows. But whenever I see how good of a man Jack is in this show, it always inspires me and makes me feel like I want to be better in my own relationship. There’s this strange purity here that I feel like you don’t get in many other shows, and I think that’s why the show has managed to become as popular as it is.
Overall, I was just blown away by this season. Like pretty much any other series out there, the show does have a few missteps in its initial episodes while it’s working to find a rhythm, but after it finds that rhythm it’s perfection. I’d say from the midway point on it’s firing on all cylinders. At that point, the show was making me cry almost every episode, which was insane to me. If you like emotional family dramas in any capacity, I highly recommend checking out This Is Us, because it’s one of the best shows running in that genre.
4.5/5
