If you’ve ever watched This Is Us and managed not to shed at least a few tears, you’re either A. dead inside or B. annoyed by what you perceive as cloying manipulation.
That’s the thing about the hit NBC drama: Although the series is drawing an impressive 12.3 million viewers and is the highest rated new series on television, This Is Us like Thirtysomething, Brothers & Sisters, and Parenthood before it, tugs at heartstrings, begging its viewers to feel everyday things on a deeper level. Whenever a drama aims for the tear ducts, people either embrace the sentiment or cringe cynically.
In time for the latest installment, which airs Nov. 15 and is titled “The Best Washing Machine In the Whole World,” here are five reasons people love or love to hate watch This Is Us.
TV critics are just like you and me. And just like you and me, some of them love the way each episode creates an empathetic conundrum that gets resolved by the end of the episode, while others despise such devises. Some examples include how Randall (Sterling K. Brown) got his name and why Toby (Chris Sullivan) divorced that hot skinny lady with whom Kate (Chrissy Metz) became obsessed.
Among the critics who appreciate such details is Marc Berman, editor-in-chief of Programming Insider. On a site called CampaignLive.com he wrote, “With no crime to be solved or no world to be saved, This Is Us allows us to focus on the characters and what makes them tick, improbable or otherwise. The multilayered characters and dense plot lines offer countless opportunities for digital debate.”
Meanwhile, Brian Moylan of TheGuardian.com thinks the drama reeks of exploitation. “This Is Us wants us to feel all of the feels and think that they are incredibly authentic and somehow put us in touch with our inner peace. They don’t quite do that, but … in a few episodes this should be a well-honed emotional manipulation machine that can make you cry easier than a combination of Old Yeller and a long-distance commercial from the mid-90s.”
Speaking of Kate, her weight battle is addressed in nearly every episode. While this is realistic — people who suffer from body-image issues do think about them nonstop — it was nice when Kate’s story line focused on her love of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Remember that?
Nico Lang of Salon.com is annoyed that Kate seems to be solely defined by her dress size despite the writers’ best intentions: “When TV writers and producers portray women like Kate as laughable or pathetic, they are sending the message that people who look like her should feel bad about it. This Is Us ends up hurting the very population it wants to represent.”
But blogger Lesley Kinzel feels that Kate’s weight is worth addressing despite the fact that it’s a touchy subject. On Medium.com she writes: “Yes, I want to see fat characters where fatness is incidental and not a plot point, I want to see so many fat characters that it’s not even a thing people notice anymore; but I also don’t want people to assume that being fat in a fat-loathing culture isn’t occasionally difficult.”
How can you not love Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) and Rebecca (Mandy Moore) for not only adopting and raising Randall but for truly trying to get the racial stuff right? In turn, the show addresses race and inter-racial adoption in groundbreaking ways. This is not Diff’rent Strokes, folks.
As Rebecca Carroll, a black woman adopted by a white family attests on Vuture.com, the fact that Randall desperately wants to connect with his biological father William (Ron Cephas Jones) couldn’t be more realistic.
“For black adoptees raised in white families, our black birth parents are kind of like Kunta Kinte — the allegorical ancestor supreme that connects us to the glorified motherland of our blackness,” she writes. “We may harbor resentment toward them at various points in our lives, but there is nothing and no one that can reach into that emotionally fraught concoction of both primal and cultural severance and pull out some kind of solace.”
But then again, there are times when the writers get the interracial stuff a little wrong, like the black hair–care conversation, according to David Kaufman of the New York Post.
“ … Or the scene where an African-American mother lectures Mama Pearson about Randall’s hair. The need to school whitey about the intricacies of black hair felt necessary and expected — though probably more relevant had Randall been a girl (trust me, it doesn’t take much to cut a black boy’s hair!)”
Now that Kevin (Justin Hartley) has abandoned his hit TV show The Manny, he’s pursuing the theater career of his dreams. Or, he’s trying to but can’t seem to get the lines or sentiment right. So his costar Olivia (Janet Montgomery) tricks him into attending a memorial service and after talking to the widow of the deceased, Kevin and viewers learn he’s still grieving his dad Jack’s death.
Although viewers still don’t know how or when Jack died, each episode makes it impossible not to love him and his relationship with his kids, which means everyone will cry like Kevin when they learn the truth. But some pundits don’t mind the wait. “In a lot of ways, finding out the emotional weight of Jack’s death will only amplify the power of the audience finding out exactly how he died,” opines Megan Vick of TVGuide.com.
Others are less accepting and patient.
What?!?! Jack is dead?!? Not ok! Not ok!!!! @MiloVentimiglia #thisisus
— reba t (@rebajesse) October 28, 2016
Making matters more heartbreaking, a flash-forward in episode five reveals how much Randall suffers when William dies. Like Jack’s death, we don’t know when this will happen but we know a terminally ill William doesn’t have that long to live. Oh, the humanity!
Enough with all this death talk. Let’s discuss what is really on our minds — Jack’s sick gym-sculpted body. Viewers on Twitter like what they see and Ventimiglia is clearly in amazing shape even if it’s a bit of an anachronistic distraction.
The producers reportedly asked the actor to stop working out so much but in the meantime, tried to explain the character’s physique by showing Jack working construction in his past.
But Jackson McHenry of Vulture.com isn’t buying it: “Milo Ventimiglia, star of This Is Us, is too buff to play a dad from the 1980s. … See, the ideal male body as we see it today — slim and yet buff in all the right places, the result of dieting, cardio, lifting, bulking, and cutting in all the right proportions — is the product of history.”
This is Us airs 9 p.m. Tuesdays on NBC
