This Is Us takes us to secular church
The show: This Is Us The moment: The sermon in the store. Randall (Sterling K. Brown), who was adopted at birth by a white family, is shopping for pants with his birth father, William (Ron Cephas Jones), whom he met only recently. Earlier, Randall’s neighbour had called security because she thought William was a vagrant and Randall had waved off the incident.
“You didn’t like me apologizing for you,” Randall says now. “Because I grew up in a white house, you think I don’t live in a black man’s world.”
William protests, but Randall continues: “You know the one, where that salesman has been eyeballing us ever since we came in. Where they’ll ask for an ID with my credit card, even though they haven’t asked for anybody else’s. Plus a million things every day that I have to choose to let go. Just so I’m not pissed off all the time. Now try on the damn flat-front chinos.”
This Is Us is the kind of precisioncrafted, network family drama — think Parenthood, Brothers & Sisters, thirtysomething — that acts as a secular church, communicating to us the rules of civil society. We witness good people navigating life’s quandaries and assess whether their choices are right or wrong.
This may seem square given our current jones for anti-heroes, where we delight in watching flawed people make bad choices. But as last May’s record-breaking response to the teaser trailer for This Is Us proved (60 million Facebook and YouTube views), if a secular-sermon show is written and cast as well as this one, there’s a real hunger for it. This Is Us airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on CTV. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.