THE STORY OF US Time-travelling TV series This Is Us is the new surprise hit.
Delivering as many cheers as tears, time-travelling TV series ‘This Is Us’ is the new surprise hit
This is … well, it appears to be 1993. Here in a high-school car park, a goateed Jack Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia) is standing by a woodpanelled Jeep and ripping into his sons—clad in opposing-team football uniforms—for brawling during the game. “What the hell were you thinking out there?” he shouts, as his wife, Rebecca (Mandy Moore), tries to calm him. “Your mother and I didn’t raise you like that! Both of you! Now, do your handshake and make up!” The teens look towards Mum, but find no mercy. “Do it now,” she seconds. They perfunctorily execute a series of hand slaps before the family silently piles into the car and Rebecca stares vacantly out the window as a world-weary Jack drives off.
While filming this scene for then new timetripping, emotion-dripping family dramedy This Is Us (airing on Wednesdays at 8.30 PM Ten), Ventimiglia never wavers in intensity (in one take, an F-bomb slips out), but the mood remains light: “You kiss Mandy Moore with that mouth?” the boys rib him between takes. This episode, which unspools the fraught saga of Kevin and Randall’s rocky relationship as brothers over several decades, marks the first time that viewers will see the family in the early 1990s—so far they have visited 1979, 1988 and present day. Which means yet another set of young actors has been hired to play Jack and Rebecca’s kids, this time as teens. “Each age range is different,” observes Moore. “Eight-year-olds are going to be eight-year-olds. Thirteen-year-olds are going to start puberty and all that craziness.” Adds Ventimiglia, “Babies are going to crap themselves, they’re not going to sleep when you tell them to and they’re not going to cry on cue.”
Speaking of weeping, perhaps these two can tell us how many tissue boxes they would rate this episode? “Oh, dude, this is a heartbreaker,” Ventimiglia enthuses. “The episode begins and ends the same way, but in reverse order,” Moore hints. “It’s an echo of their relationship ... and we highlight the journey that this relationship has taken and where they find themselves now, which is—it’s not a good spot. It feels ominous. I would say, hmmm, maybe three tissue boxes?” Ventimiglia agrees: “I’d give it three. And one of those little handy packs you put in your pocket.”
Stock up, buckle up, and try to keep up: the story of Us is just getting started. Created by Crazy, Stupid, Love screenwriter Dan Fogelman, the series presented itself as a tale about thirtysomethings who share the same birthday—jack, whose sexy celebration with pregnantwith-triplets wife Rebecca is interrupted when she goes into labour and loses one baby during childbirth; Kevin (Justin Hartley), whose desire to be taken seriously results in a viral meltdown and a career shake-up; Kate (Chrissy Metz), Kevin’s plus-size twin and personal assistant who seeks to change her life and body; and Randall (Sterling K. Brown), a successful family man compelled to trace his biological father, William (Ron Cephas Jones).
But near the end of the pilot, a heartwarming head rush of a twist suddenly changed the game—thanks to a firefighter lighting a cigarette in a hospital—and we realised we were actually watching Jack and Rebecca 36 years ago as the new parents of Kate, Kevin and Randall (dubbed the Big Three), while their grown-up stories were unspooling in present day. Episode 2 of This Is Us then followed that wow! with an ow! (and a how?) in the final scene when present-day Rebecca, aka Grandma, dropped by Randall’s house with Grandpa, but Grandpa turned out to be ... Jack’s best friend, Miguel (Jon Huertas). Where is Jack? Bitterly divorced? Dead? At a Steelers game? All theories welcome.
The amiable puppeteer behind the feel-good hit underestimated how many heartstrings the show would pull. “I always knew what the series was going to be, I knew what the second episode was going to be, I knew how it was going to end,”
“I would say, hmmm, maybe three tissue boxes” —Mandy Moore
says Fogelman. “I didn’t realise it would be so cathartic and emotional for people—and even myself. There’s something big about it I can’t explain.”
The This Is Us light bulb illuminated a few years ago when Fogelman noticed the kaleidoscopic contrast of his friends’ lives on his Facebook feed. He first saw a movie idea about people going through very different things at the exact same age—and the ripple effect that our parents’ actions have on our lives at crossroad moments—but soon realised he could go deeper with a TV show. He also wanted to play with nonlinear storytelling. “Imagine you had 10 VHS tapes of your entire adolescence and your parents’ marriage, and you mixed them up in a bag, so you don’t know what order you’re going to be watching them,” he says. “Just by the way your dad and mom are talking from behind that camera you can say, ‘Oh, there was a little more tension during that period in their lives.’ ‘Something got better there.’ ‘Something got worse there.’ ”
Fogelman brainstormed a multi-decade timeline for the Pearsons and assembled a group of writers (some of them playwrights) who were willing to go deep and personal. “The first week in that writers’ room was one of the most intense weeks of work I’ve ever had,” declares Fogelman, who also created TV series Galavant. “People were revealing the hardest tragedies in their lives, the most uplifting moments. You were numb by the end of the week.”
Meanwhile, a diverse cast was recruited, including Sterling K. Brown, who had yet to win his Emmy for The People v O.j.simpson: American Crime Story. “It was intriguing to play somebody who is frequently a fish out of water,” explains Brown. “And the part with the father resonates hugely because of having lost my father at 10 and recognising how deep that goes.” American Horror Story star Chrissy Metz was hooked by just the description of Kate, who is loosely based on Fogelman’s sister, now a consultant on the show. (The writers also met with experts on issues such as food addiction and interracial adoptions.) “There’s a plussize girl who is remotely attractive who has somebody interested in her and she is dealing with her self-worth?” marvels Metz. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s a real story here’—something really important that needs to be addressed on television.”
The producers (including Crazy, Stupid, Love directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa) were having difficulty casting the role of Kevin until Revenge’s Justin Hartley auditioned. “John was like, ‘How can a person that f--king
“I didn’t realise it would be so cathartic” —Dan Fogelman
good-looking be funny?’ ” says Fogelman, chuckling. “He was so annoyed by that.”
Moore—who knew Fogelman from Tangled, which he wrote—was cast as Rebecca after nailing her “I’m done letting you lower our score” speech to Jack. As for the patriarch, Fogelman rethought the character after meeting with Heroes star Ventimiglia. “I was picturing a much more normal guy, like me,” recalls Fogelman. “Milo came in with long hair, beard, a motorcycle and a leather jacket. There was blue-collar alpha-ness, a kind of optimism to him, like ‘I’m going to will this family forward,’ that I hadn’t intended. But it was clear that that’s the guy.”
The US also seemed to put family first—when the show made its debut there last September, it drew 14.6 million viewers, with social media aflutter over the twist. “One of the things I love about sports is when you see something amazing happen and everyone in the room goes, ‘ What?’ ” says Hartley. “That’s what people were doing, just admitting that mind-blow: ‘You got me.’ But it wasn’t a gimmick.”
Gimmick or not, introducing various incarnations of the Big Three does come with its challenges. “Not only do you have to find kids who can closely approximate and feel like our three adult actors, they also need to carry a lot of material,” says Fogelman. “And then you need to put them together to make sure one kid doesn’t feel older than the other kids, and that they feel all right together.” Meanwhile, Ventimiglia and Moore have to jockey between playing wide-eyed and well-worn parents and everything in between.
“When I sat down for that initial meeting with Dan and we went in the writers’ room and saw the timeline written out around the [wall], I was like, ‘Holy shit! I’m going to have a panic attack,’ because I have to have so much information and backstory in my brain at all times,” says Moore. “I’ve decided that I’m just going to take it on a need-to-know basis because otherwise I would be drowning trying to figure everything out.” (Perhaps now isn’t the best time to inform her that by season’s end, Fogelman says, the show “will have explored at least six time periods.”)
Of course, the biggest time jump for Moore (and Huertas) was in Episode 2. The actress went through five tests before the makeup team formulated a proper ageing makeover, which includes a dozen small prosthetics on her face and neck; she also worked with a physicality coach. (It passed muster with Metz—when she saw Moore for the first time as a grandma, she did a double take and started crying.)
While you’ll see more of Rebecca and Miguel, you won’t find out exactly how she wound up with him instead of Jack for a while. “If there’s a mystery, it will be with the details of what happened,” says Fogelman. “But some of the big-picture information you’ll have by the end of the season.”
Some fans seemed to have already made up their minds. “I had a flood of messages saying, ‘What? F--king Miguel! Are you kidding me? Where are you? Did you get divorced?’ ” says Ventimiglia. “[After] two episodes I feel like people were really, really in love with Jack and Rebecca. What I’ve been saying to everyone was ‘Just wait.’ ” The couple’s disconnect will increase as Jack becomes consumed with a new corporate job and Rebecca revisits the music career she abandoned to be a mother (which reintroduces an old bandmate played by Sam Trammell).
“Every episode will have some form of storytelling, which makes you go either Aw! or Ah!” says Fogelman, before noting he’s mindful of not going too far in either direction. “It is something I’m monitoring, actually,” he says. “Let’s make sure we’re not all going crazy and trying to make every scene a cry. Tying something together in an interesting way can be as fulfilling as a big twist.” We’ll get heartbreaking insight into young William in Episode 3, which also reveals his unexpected connection with Rebecca. Kevin relocates to New York, where he will land a role in a pretentious Off-broadway play opposite a blunt British actress (Janet Montgomery).
William and Randall will continue their complicated getting-to-know-you process with William’s terminal illness looming. “There’s something about blood, and your blood induces this love thing, no matter if it’s good love or bad love or difficult love,” says Jones. Randall’s protective wife, Beth (Susan Kelechi Watson), starts dropping her guard, too. Kate will explore different ways to lose weight, and an encounter with the ex-wife of her new beau Toby (Chris Sullivan) will put stress on their relationship. Also, an unlikely pair of characters will form an intense bond over pot brownies.
In the meantime, though, prepare to see a family tale told with equal parts earnestness and inventiveness. “It’s nice there’s something so different, because I believe we all have this light within, we all crave that, even if it’s not cool, even if we secretly watch the show in our bedrooms,” says Metz. “It’s like the kids who wore their backpacks with two straps. It’s only one strap if you’re cool. But then people started wearing two straps, and you’re like, ‘Oh, this is cool, too.’ This is a two-strap show.” And at least as many tissues.
“Holy shit! I’m going to have a panic attack” —Mandy Moore