Get your tissues, this show brings the tears
I was always going to be an easy mark.
For the drama This Is Us, that is. Just anointed Fall’s Best New Show by Entertainment Weekly, it’s ticking towards 10 million viewers a week (big numbers in these days of fractured-TV viewing) — it’s long been on my to-watch list, in part because it promised a whole U-Haul of feels (as the kids like to say). And if there’s anything I appreciate — because I’m a world-class sobber — it’s a show I can weep with.
But even I underrated how quickly it would become my own personal tissue-fest and therapist’s couch. Cancel all my plans! Block my calendar! Tuesdays at 9 p.m. is now time for appointment television. It’s the rare show I choose to real-time watch so I can real-time cry.
Pivoting around the joys, loves and travails of an extended family, This Is Us was initially billed as “the new Parenthood”, though with a time-twist — it zips back and forth between the lives of parents in their late 30s and their children at the same age; it’s sort of Parenthood meets Lost. Actually, scratch that: centred around different characters and set-pieces, it’s more of a Love Actually for the pumpkin spice latte generation.
A beleaguered beefcake! A plussized heroine! Mandy Moore! The show seemingly has something for everyone, including the most excellent Sterling K. Brown, who grabbed an Emmy last month for his performance in The People v. O.J. Simpson.
Oh, and this: though small-screen sob-enablers have long been with us (it’s a list that includes everything from Gilmore Girls and Party of Five to Transparent, Brothers & Sisters and Friday Night Lights), This is Us comes along at a time when we need it most, perhaps.
We live in a period when so much of good TV is too-cool-for-school TV — be it the acidic Veep, or bombastic Game of Thrones — and there’s room for a low-concept, human-scale show that’s neither laden in irony, nor trimmed with gore.
If there ever was a time for television show to cause a good cathartic cry it’d be this one — 2016 is the year of terror attacks, Zika and Brexit, a ghastly presidential campaign and the continuing wreckage in Syria, not to the mention the losses of irreplaceables such as Prince, David Bowie, Muhammad Ali, Alan Rickman, Elie Wiesel and Harper Lee.
What remains the lure of the wallow-in show? There are stealth health benefits to crying along with a television show. UCLA psychiatrist Judith Orloff stated in 2011 that our bodies produce three kinds of tears — “reflex, continuous and emotional” — and each one has a healing role, and it’s the emotional tears, in particular, that “shed stress hormones” and activate the “parasympathetic nervous system.”
One study, conducted in 35 countries, and compiled in the book Why Only Humans Weep: Unravelling the Mysteries of Tears, found that, on average, women cried between 30 and 64 times a year, relative to men who do so six to 17 times. Reading that, I realized that I’d long been over performing.
I cry all the time. Indeed, I cry every day. Not weeping, at least a little, strikes me as odd as not laughing, even a little, every day — all part of the emotional arsenal! I cry at commercials (have you seen that one about Google Chrome?), when reading a news story, seeing a friend’s joy and seeing a random act of kindness. I love crying at trailers (so much more expedient than sitting through a whole movie). I wailed through the whole Adele concert when I caught her in Toronto recently, bawled while reading the wonderful new Ann Patchett novel, Commonwealth, and teared up just seeing the beauty of Santorini, when I was in Greece this past summer.
I distinctly remember watching Andre Agassi — when he won Wimbledon, in 1992 — falling to his knees, in a big, lovely weep, which, of course, got me on a roll, too. Nothing like watching others cry to get my ducts going, too.
All of which is a long way of saying I welcome the weekly wistful-fest that’s This Is Us, a show which its creator, Dan Fogelman (who wrote the movie Crazy Stupid Love) has described this way: “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.”
Even its cast is in knots. “I cried the first time I saw the first episode,” Moore has admitted. And, even now, during table reads of the show, she says, she continues to get wrecked. “Every script,” she said, “there is something.”