If you know me well, you know that I believe strongly in the quality versus darkness balance when it comes to entertainment. This principle guides my television viewing (with the notable exception of reality TV, which is a different animal and deserves its own essay). If a show has too much darkness – be it gore, emotional manipulation, murder, death, sad stuff about kids – without the balance of brilliant writing, unparalleled acting, set design, etc., then it is a no-go for me. This principle is why I’ve loved some of the darkest shows out there (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos), and why others (Game of Thrones, pretty much anything Ryan Murphy has ever created) cause me to cut bait and run. I’m unwilling to put myself through being dragged over cut glass if there’s no real reason for it other than that I’m shredded to pieces at the end. And lots of people believe that This Is Us is a cry-factory, creating storylines intended to do nothing but stick us right between the ribs with scene after tear-jerking scene.
This Is Us isn’t without its flaws. Nearly all of last season was a wandering, confusing twist through the writers’ collective struggle to both address the pandemic but not be consumed by it. It lost the thread so many times, particularly with Randall’s and Kevin’s storylines. Even in the early episodes of this season, I was worried about how much time we were spending on peripheral characters rather than devoting these last precious episodes to the principal characters we’ve devoted so much heart and brain space to over the last six years.
But this week’s incredibly emotional penultimate episode brought me back to what profoundly works about this show, and why it’s not just a “weekly cry” for the sake of itself and nothing else. When This Is Us is at its best, it’s collapsing time in on itself, reminding all of us about the nature of both mortality and what it means to be truly alive. In this episode, we watched Rebecca walk through a train hurtling toward her death, car by car, filled with memories and memorabilia to anchor her in each season of her life. What has always been a show about life’s most brutal, real, joyous, and transcendent moments suddenly served us one final question: as we look backwards, how do we measure our lives?
As Rebecca passed through the cars, guided by William (which, I mean, immediate tears from me there), she walked by booths filled with her sons. And I don’t mean just the adult versions of Randall and Kevin – i mean every actor that has ever played these characters, from the tiny, elementary-school versions to the big kid versions to the teenaged versions, sitting together with the adult actors who rank highest on the call sheet. It was all the Randalls. All the Kevins. Beth in college and Beth as a grown, fully-formed adult woman who can “take [Randall] the rest of the way” (again, goodbye to my makeup). Baby Sophie and Kevin and newlywed Sophie and Kevin.
Kate, who in real time is making her way from London to her dying mother’s bedside, is notably absent from the cast until the very last car. Once she arrives at the cabin and joins her brothers in the physical space they’re sharing with their mother, saying last goodbyes, she appears in the car in Rebeca’s memory. Not many versions of Kate, just one. The little girl version, holding a jar of lightning bugs. Rebeca’s “Bug,” in the end, was the last thing she saw before she passed into a different realm and a different room where Jack was waiting. Kate was the bridge that allowed Rebecca to cross over. And we were reminded that for all its incredibly acted scenes that include fathers and sons (and there were legion), Rebecca’s most reliable comfort was the complicated, fraught, and ultimately healed relationship with her only daughter (and daughters holding it down for entire families everywhere gave a collective cheer).
We’ve met many tangential characters in the run of this show, and Dan Fogelman is a master at taking us down one path only to make a hard right turn at the last minute. Marcus, who we’re led to believe is Deja’s boyfriend and the father of their coming baby, actually belongs to a completely different family. After a few untethered minutes after Malik is revealed to be the father (yay!), we see Marcus’ distraught dad walking into a hospital break room to collect himself after a hollow reassurance to his family that their son, fresh out of a car accident, would be okay. As he pours his coffee, the camera pans up to show the other man in the room, a dirty and soot-covered Jack Pearson, just before his own death. Jack offers Marcus’ dad the same advice Dr. K offered him eighteen years before, which the show is brilliant enough not to make us hear delivered again, but instead reminds us (in addition to the lemon bowl in the bar cart) by showing Marcus and his grown-up siblings laughing about how that piece of advice became their family motto. And here is the quiet brilliance of this show.
Even in this highly documented world, we’ll never have camera crews following us around, documenting the dust floating through the golden-hour light as we sing and dance with our small children. We’ll never have footage to watch back of the moments we were at our most beautiful, or the panic attacks we have on the floors of our offices, or the gutting moments of our deepest despair and loss, or the best advice we ever got. Our lives aren’t television shows. And yet, there’s a flip side to that very lack of documentation that This Is Us goes out of its way to prove time and again: we will never know the ways that our lives intertwine and connect. We’ll never know how the advice we got from one stranger and gave to another one again shaped an entire family. We’re not privy to how our decision to persist with a problem until we found a solution inspired someone else to find their own grit, to an end big (curing Alzheimer’s) or small (creating curricula for blind students). We have no concept of the harm our mistakes have wrought unless someone shares it with us, and we’ll die without ever really feeling the impact of how our love for the people in our lives has buoyed and bolstered them to simply keep moving forward. We don’t have the benefit of the camera. But we have the ability to be present.
We can see the golden-hour light as it happens. We can reach across the table to hold hands. We can embrace the corny chance to express our love and appreciation for each other at every opportunity. We can honor the children who live deep inside us by giving their dreams life as the adults we turned into. We can tell the bedtime stories (even better, the tall tales) that bring our grandparents’ histories to our children in vivid technicolor. We can know we’re in the good old days while we’re still in them. And we can assume that our kindnesses, our acts of grace, our forgiveness, our recognition of our mistakes, our apologies, and our bravery have ripples that extend beyond our own lives and into the wider world.
It’s easy (and, as William points out, lazy) to believe that life is sad because everything ends and therefore nothing really matters. But This Is Us submits over and over for our consideration that, in fact, nearly everything matters. The ability to see through time – back into who our parents were as children, who we were; forward into what we hope our lives will amount to when we’re gone – can inform our present behaviors in ways both beautiful and profound.
This Is Us has never made us cry for no reason. The reason it makes us cry is that it’s reminding us weekly that the mundane parts of life ARE WHAT LIFE IS, that this is no dress rehearsal, that we are in it RIGHT NOW. It shoves a lump into our throats and practically screams, “Do you get it? Do you feel something? This is it!” It only becomes schmaltz if our response is to throw our Kleenex away and forget what we’ve learned about living and dying from this creative, beautiful piece of art. Our tears come from a unique place in our guts, from something that gets pinged week after week as we encounter the truth universally experienced but almost never discussed: we are all going to die. And the best any one of us can do is try to live. Not perfectly, but by God, on purpose.
“I’ve made so many mistakes.”
“But what a thing you made of it all. What a big, messy, gigantic, spectacular thing.”