This Is Us

From the desk

The Family Portrait That Made Monday Feel Like a Premiere

Filed by Lana Reyes · Red Carpet Reality

NBC's Pearson serial as an image campaign for American feeling: aging makeup as the real costume plot, Super Bowl as a national living room, and a finale that posed everyone one last time.

The first look is a family that photographs like a campaign. Not a political one — a lifestyle one. Flannel, kitchen light, a Philadelphia house that understands cameras even when nobody in it is famous yet. This Is Us arrived on NBC in 2016 selling sincerity the way a fragrance launch sells memory: close-ups, timelines, a promise that if you stay, the portrait will complete. Mandy Moore's face is the long con of the costume department. You watch her age forward and backward until the latex becomes the point. Style is the plot, even when the style is a dad sweater.

Network Monday in a streaming decade is a kind of red carpet nobody credits. There is no gown. There is a couch, a tissue box, and eighteen million people performing the same expression at the same commercial break. Dan Fogelman's machine understood event television as family photography: reveal the secret in the portrait, then wait a week so the portrait can hang in the office. Tessa liveblogged the twists like they were ship wars. Fair. I am looking at the light on Milo Ventimiglia's profile and the way Sterling K. Brown holds a room like he was fitted for it. The ensemble is the look.

Look board, Pearson edition: (1) hospital pastels, the original sin of the timeline; (2) Super Bowl Sunday as the closest network drama got to a national premiere, living rooms dressed in team colors and grief; (3) Memphis heat, a different family's cloth entering the picture; (4) wedding silk that has to carry three decades of unfinished business; (5) cabin knits, firelight, the American myth of a house that can still be saved. None of this is accidental. The show's most famous hours are fittings for feeling. You can call that manipulation. You can also call it craft. A tear that photographs is still a tear.

I will allow the vulnerable note. Watching a network drama insist that ordinary people deserve close-ups is exhausting in the way a long press tour is exhausting. Everyone is always about to say the true thing, and the true thing always arrives in golden hour. Then you remember that streaming originals were busy being cool, and this thing was busy being watched. That is not nothing. The Pearson kids — Randall, Kate, Kevin — are styled as three versions of American aspiration, and the series keeps asking which outfit you would rather grow old in. The correct answer is that you do not get to choose the aging. Only the photographer does.

Is it prestige? It won the Monday, which is a different prize. Is it soap? Soap wishes it had this editing. The time jumps are the tailoring: a scene in 1998 hemmed against a scene in 2018 until cause and effect look like a matching set. You do not have to love every subplot. You do have to respect a show that treated a Super Bowl lead-out like a solemn fitting and got away with it. Skip the discourse that pretends crying is lowbrow. The highbrow shows cry. They just do it in better coats.

The series ended on purpose. Us, May 2022, is a last family photo, not a cliff the network forgot to light. Six seasons is a long campaign. The smart ones know when to stop adding looks. See you at the after-party, which in this case is the rewatch: same house, same sweaters, the second pass where you notice the extra in the hallway because you already know the secret in the portrait. The airport departure — the quieter episodes, the ones without a national title — will tell you if you actually loved these people, or just loved how they were lit.

Episode guide

How this series is filed

TV Flash files This Is Us (2016–2022) on NBC as the episode guide: 106 listed hours across 6 seasons, 2016-09-20–2022-05-24 from “Pilot” (S01E01) to “Us” (S06E18).

Open the episode guide · S01E01 Pilot · S06E18 Us