Me, Too

On the excellence of 'This Is Us'

My standard evening decompression routine involves streaming TV shows. This summer, while restlessly casting about for something to watch, I came across This Is Us on Netflix. The show, which ran on NBC from 2016 to 2022, will likely go down as one of the last standard broadcast television hit dramas (42 minutes per hourlong installment, with a large margin for advertisements). In its heyday in the late 2010s, it drew in the neighborhood of 15 million viewers weekly, which is about as good as TV shows do in the twenty-first century. I was barely aware of it at the time—I recognized the name of its star Mandy Moore as a celebrity, but couldn’t tell you why—but now I’m hooked.

The premise of This is Us is simple: We meet the young, white, quintessentially middle-class Pittsburgh married couple Jack and Rebecca Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia and Moore) in 1980, when Rebecca is about to give birth to triplets. Only two, named Kevin and Kate, survive; the Pearsons make an instinctive decision to deal with their grief about the third child, Kyle, by adopting an African American foundling, whose name becomes Randall (as in black poet Randall Jarrell, a storyline in itself) while still in the hospital. Over the course of the next six seasons, each episode deals with an aspect of Pearson family life, broadly construed, but the twist is that we see it unfold in a series of snapshots over four generations. A given episode on quotidian aspects of family life—like Thanksgiving dinner, or a family vacation, or garden-variety sibling rivalry—is sliced into a series of parallel snapshots that toggle back and forth across generations. Particularly skillful is the way the series deals with moments set in the future; it manages to sidestep awkward speculations about fashions or events by keeping the focus on interpersonal relations. Until we get there, the show unobtrusively blends in pop culture references, especially music, and historical events, from the moon landing to Covid, as backdrop and storyline. (Conspicuously absent is the distraction of party politics.)

Much of the success of This Is Us has to do with the cast and production values. But its core is the quietly spectacular quality of the writing. The juxtapositions and dialogue are tremendous; the pacing is really impressive. Each season focuses on major events in a family life cycle—birth, death, marriage, the uncovering of family secrets—in ways that are both granular and resonant. I’m sure my friends and family are thoroughly bored with me now for saying things like, “Yeah, this reminds of me of this thing that happened in This is Us when ….”

I do want to take a moment to specifically mention the way This is Us depicts aspects of African American family life. (And in particular to note the work of Sterling K. Brown, who I first encountered last year as a libertine gay doctor in American Fiction, but in This Is Us plays a well-meaning but uptight dad.) The show is a product of the Black Lives Matter moment, a topic depicted in its run, and reflects a conscious decision that 30% of its writing staff be black. Its directors include the accomplished Regina King, as well as the white Ken Olin, who starred in Thirtysomething (1987-1991) a show with a comparable sensibility, though not as rich. I found watching This is Us to be profoundly educative in illuminating the rhythms of African American families, both in the ways it does and doesn’t track those of other Americans. There are also some textured subplots involving the Vietnam War—Jack and his brother Nicky are veterans, their experiences shown in flashback—from Asian perspectives.

I send you this missive 87 installments into the show’s 106-episode run, and I don’t want it to end—part of the suspense all along for me is whether it will continue to sustain its excellence. But if you have the good fortune of not having watched this This Is Us, congratulations: a great experience awaits.