Being a voracious reader since forever, I have always been a sucker for a good story. Unwittingly, I tend to submerge myself in characters so completely that for those few moments I belong entirely to them — crying with them, laughing with them — oblivious of the tear rolling down my cheek or the smile plastered on my face, participating in their glee as well as their grief.
So when I came across “This Is Us” on NBC.com and Amazon Prime, my curiosity was piqued for many reasons. It all started with a news article that caught my attention. Highlighting the acting chops of the mellifluous Mandy Moore, this piece even flirted with a possible Emmy run, witnessing a meteoric rise in popularity. It was a running dual role of a young mother of triplets in a storyline oscillating between the past and present day where she plays an older woman eventually confronting an impending age-related disease.
Eager to see Moore on screen after a long time, I dove right in.
Family and mental health
I was hooked from the first episode. The pairing of Milo Ventimiglia and Mandy Moore as husband and wife is nothing short of a masterstroke. The passionately in-love, all-in superhero father and husband played by Ventimiglia, masterfully exuding the perfect cocktail of gravitas, charm, compassion, bravado, humility and problem-solver dad had my full attention from the get-go.
Inarguably, if Ventimiglia is the ship that keeps the story afloat, Moore and her immaculate craft are the sails that propel it all forward. With a few charming smiles that age gracefully much like the rest of her, Moore lures you in and makes you believe that Rebecca Pearson is who she is now and forever; that we can never go back to someone called Mandy Moore. Hailing from different worlds, these two characters fit like two broken pieces of the same whole, glued together by their own impervious love.
Unlike other gripping shows that I tend to binge-watch at optimal speed, I took my time with this one. Like a fine wine that is savored and relished with every sip, I took my time to unearth the treasure trove of familial bonds. In particular, between the Pearson triplets — the imperfections, the fractious relationships that conversely also formed the cornerstones supporting the reformed relationships of their later years.
Well-embroidered
What I loved the most was the brilliantly and most intricately sewn layer upon layer of not just the broader base story, but the amount of light shone on the unraveling of each character’s backstories and underlying complexities.
Three siblings who could not be more different, battling their own unique demons since their childhood, deliver a poignant and relatable lesson on the importance of staying united as a family, even in periods of estrangement and coming together to lift up loved ones. I also noted how their father’s influence pulsates through these characters in all they do as their lives progress.
Pick a social issue
In its ingenuity, the show has incorporated important global issues like racism, body shaming, eating disorders, LGBTQIA+ living (seniors and teens), child disabilities, anxiety and mental health into each of its character stories.
How this family comes together for each of its members going through one of these issues, and how the show successfully manages to normalize these conversations is what struck me. Especially those plots under the category of mental health like Randall Pearson’s unrelenting anxiety issues, Kate Pearson’s damaged self-esteem with her weight, and Kevin Pearson’s enormous pressure on himself to live up to the man his father was. Kevin finds himself failing miserably at every step; he’s kind, but not the deepest.
Affection in our homes
Even an aging Rebecca in the throes of an impending disorder still battles with profound grief after many years, and brings forth the importance of mental health patients. Conversations that need to start within the four walls of our own homes.
Especially today, on the heels of a gradually quieting global pandemic that upended lives and fractured relationships, the need for families to double down on regular public displays of affection — especially in front of and with their children — is important in my life.
This is something I circle back to often. When I grew up, there was a clear lack of public displays of affection. We just weren’t “huggers”. It didn’t help that the society that surrounded us when we were growing up, and continues to dictate the acceptability of such acts of physical affection in public like hugging and kissing, also ostensibly made such desires within many families within their realm stay away from it. Or perhaps be more conscious of it. This was something the series hit home for me too and I find myself consciously making an effort to encourage physical gestures of love towards my siblings by modeling it for them too.
Diversity and body shaming
In the early 1980s, a white American couple with twin babies adopts a third, an African American newborn abandoned by his father at a fire station. Steeped with the versatility that very few others possess, the inimitable Sterling K. Brown plays this grown-up Black boy, Randall Pearson, who was born to a black family but raised by a white one and was still trying to unearth the full story of his biological family’s checkered past. The show acts as the conduit that brings forth the harsh racism that people of color have been subjected to since time immemorial and still in the period in which the show is based.
It’s a wake-up call to recognize that the difference in color cannot and should not overshadow the sameness of all humanity. We often tend to begin this very important and urgent education too late. Just the other day, when my three-year-old son said that he did not want to play with our house help anymore because she was “dark” in color and not “white” like us, I knew that this education hadn’t started soon enough. A three-year-old doesn’t fully understand the weight of his words, but unwittingly he brought forth the urgency of handholding and guidance on this issue at the toddler stage itself.
Mental health too, remains a core and underlying commonality permeating the essence of the entire show and through all the time periods. Randall Pearson grew up with a white family that was so busy trying to give him a “normal” childhood that they never once addressed his “blackness” and the baggage that comes with it. Or how it could be affecting him and his curiosity to know more about his community and where he really came from. It is one of the main reasons his relationship with his siblings is consistently complicated.
When I think of how my four-year-old is learning to embrace his classmates who come from all cultures, races, countries, sizes and colors of skin, and how all of this is their “normal” right from the get-go, it fills me with hope for a more inclusive, loving, and broad-minded future.
There’s more
A very overweight Kate Pearson struggles with weight loss, the inability to have a child, multiple failed IVF attempts, and ultimately the success of surrogacy while her best friend is struggling with the eating disorder bulimia. So many issues in this one sentence that go tabooed, unspoken, ill-approved, hushed-and-brushed under the carpet in so many countries and cultures even today. So many issues that for the most part only garner sneering spite instead of support.
The effortless execution of the portrayal of all these important issues in the show is noteworthy. They don’t all resolve. And then, there is illness [please ensure that the text in peach isn’t visible to the reader until they click after Spoiler Tag Alert to reveal it!] Spoiler Tag Alert Alzheimer’s disease is addressed across an arc of episodes. This one hits close to home as it was what took my grandfather from us almost two decades ago. Moore’s portrayal of a woman who has just been diagnosed early with this neurologic disorder is Emmy-worthy in my book.
Aging in the four walls of our own houses
I was still in school and too young to fully comprehend that this evil disease was slowly but surely consuming my grandfather — shutting down his organs bit by bit inside the four walls of our own house. In many ways, this show that I watched decades after losing him is a sort of closure that I needed and didn’t fully understand that I needed back then.
I can write a whole book on why this show is a must-watch, but that would be tough to do without more spoiler alerts! It’s a riveting, heartwarming and stirring watch for everyone in every capacity — as a parent, a mother, a father, a wife, a caregiver, a child, a friend, a partner.
These are our stories too.
There’s a reason they call it “This Is Us.”
