Who else remembers the commercials for the premiere of This Is Us?
This Is Us premiered back in September 2016. Do you remember where you were then? 2016 was a good and crazy year in my life. I went to New York City with my family. The company I just joined was bought out by another company. Life was good and drama free. It was a mere 6 years ago, but it’s many lifetimes ago of my life now.
Isn’t it funny how when you see or hear certain years now, they used to sound so far into the future or so recent, but now those years are like long gone? It’s like when I see the year 2018 or even 2020. You’d see a commercial for a movie that wouldn’t be out for another year or you’re working on a project with a due date that’s many quarters off into the future. But all of those days and years have come and gone. The series finale of This Is Us is on Tuesday, but in a couple of weeks, months, years, it’ll be another show that came and went and it’ll go into a streaming time capsule.
And that’s how This Is Us feels like. The show teased us in the first episode that it was maybe going to be some supernatural show in which a common birthday, August 31, meant something more. But it turned out that it wasn’t a show about something supernatural or even super human. This Is Us was going to be a show about families and the goings on in the days and months and years that happen to a family.
The Pearsons comprised of dad Jack, mom Rebecca, and siblings Kevin, Kate, and Randall from Pitsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Pearsons can be like any family. They’re perfect and peculiar all at once or just sometimes. What always amazed me with This Is Us is that the three siblings or The Big Three as their mom and dad affectionately called them, look nothing like each other and have no physical resemblance to each other. Yet they are most definitely siblings. And we get to see what happens to these siblings before, during, and after what insurance companies call a life changing event when the towering patriarch, dies from a heart attack due to a house fire.
The start of the series was buoyed by the mystery of how exactly Jack died. Viewers were dying to know how exactly the world’s greatest dad played by the forever young Milo Ventimiglia, died. I think one of the more farfetched theories was that Jack died in September 11 as the Pearson kids looked to be young adults at a flashback to the funeral sequence.
But This Is Us was more than just family secrets or family mysteries. It was the journeys of a family that was destroyed after the death of the father, yet they still had to keep living their lives. Like everyone else does. There’s more opportunities for laughter, joy, and of course, tears. There’s a joke that you can never watch an episode of This Is Us without crying and it’s true. Life is really a bee-aatch a lot of the times.
This Is Us expertly time travels backwards and forwards and in parallel without ever skipping a beat or cutting a thread from the theme. It’s a little bit like Once Upon A Time which was always able to align the multiverses very well of the fairy tale versions of the characters and their earthly selves.
Perhaps what draws me and most everyone to This Is Us is that they are us. We see their lives from their inception and to their deaths and it’s so very sad when it ends. What makes seeing Rebecca Pearson die so sad is that we knew her when. We knew her when she was a little girl growing up in an uptight, upper class household. And to when she was a cool chick singer who meets Jack Pearson. She becomes a mother three times over in one night and then she’s on that path of being a supermom and super wife. And it’s so wonderful for her because she’s got that wonderful husband and those three cute kids. But just as things seemed to have gotten started for the Pearson family, it was over when Jack dies unexpectedly. And then Rebecca is a single mom and having to raise the kids on her own.
We all cross paths with elderly people who look like Rebecca did in the ending episodes, but we probably just see them as that. They’re old and wrinkly and shuffle around. We don’t see that they probably were a hot mama or a ripped dad like how Rebecca and Jack were. But for those who know them, they know them and they see them for all of the years that they had lived. They sang in clubs. They went on road trips. They could protect their kids. Even though Rebecca is in her twilight years when she passes, just as in the episode The Train, we see her as the young and vibrant Rebecca. And that’s probably how she and others who knew her remember her as.
What I love most about This Is Us is how much so many parts of it reminds me of my own childhood and my family. Jack Pearson is so much like my dad. Maybe like many parents out there. Sometimes all they have to show for themselves are their kids and that’s how I feel like Jack felt about his kids. Or at least in the early years before he started his own construction company. Jack’s love for his kids was unconditional and without criticism. I loved all the moments when Kate wanted something to eat that wasn’t good for her and though Rebecca would tell her No, Jack would always give in. It’s just baby fat, he would always say. It’s just like my mom and dad. From my experience, moms tend to be more critical and obsessed with their daughters’ weight and bodies. And eating less is the best way to keep from gaining weight. It made me think then and now that being fat is like the worst thing that can ever happen for a girl.
Watching This Is Us reminds me of the good times that have come and gone. And it makes me sad that my siblings and I will eventually go through what the Pearson kids have gone through. We’ll all have to go through that one day. It was so great to see Kevin and the other family members step up to surround Kate in her final years, so she wouldn’t have to be alone. I think that is the way to go for everyone. You can’t depend on nurse aides or paid help. You need family who are in the house 24/7 and can be trusted to do the work. We also got to see Kevin’s growth as a flaky actor with no stability become the mature man who was willing to sacrifice his life and put it on hold, so his mom would be taken care of. And who didn’t shed some tears when Madison and Nicky also stepped forward to pitch in as well?
I must admit that during the fourth and fifth seasons was when I stopped watching This Is Us regularly. After the reveal of Jack dying, I think the series lost a bit of its grounding which was the patriarch that colored all of their lives. The switch from the trauma of losing their dad to the melodrama of their lives didn’t seem as compelling. I didn’t care much for Randall and Beth’s marital problems and how many more times will Kevin screw up another second chance with Sophie or some other chick? But after watching the last two seasons, I see how they all connect and I want to go back and see those episodes that I missed. This Is Us is all of us and that is why the series finale feels like a chapter of our own lives is closing.You can purchase full seasons on streaming platforms like iTunes or YouTube if you haven’t seen them, yet.
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