This Is Us Ending

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I resisted watching ‘This is Us’ when it first came on.

It was too popular. I figured there was something wrong with something everyone loved.

Then I watched a few episodes in a row and was hooked.

We are coming down to the last couple of episodes. Here are some realities to it all:

1). Mandy Moore is beautiful. She remained beautiful all through the show. All the way to the end.

2). The episodes that truly got to me were the ones that showed Jack as a Dad. I had a terrific Dad who wasn’t perfect all the time, but his love was. 

Jack knew what made each of his kids tick. That was my Dad’s greatest strength. He wasn’t a writer, but he could talk to me about it. Dad knew when to reach out, and when to be strong.

And like Jack. He loved us above all else. My siblings and I spent some time just marveling at the writing. 

3). The sibling rivalry and the sibling love also spoke to me and my siblings as well as my wife and her siblings. The relationships weren’t always perfect. None are. 

The characters were fully developed through years of excellent writing and terrific acting.

4). The years went by in a blink of an eye during the years of the show.

I’m very fond of yelling at directors in movies who start at one place and spend the whole movie confusing the hell out of me by releasing a little bit of what is happening or has happened by using young actors to show me why the ones who started the movie are screwed up.

‘This is Us’ was a master class in developing a plot with the young versions of the characters and subtly establishing why each character arrived at the man or woman they became.

The younger versions were also terrifically cast and the older versions makeup and aging never once took me out of the show.

5). It’s about life.

More than the family they presented.

It’s all of our families in one way or another.

Because it shows all of what life is:

Love and loss and celebrating and pain and death and life and being destroyed by grief and pressing on.

It all winds up next week, and I don’t know what the awards shows to honor television are called…

…but ‘This is Us’ deserves to win a lot of them.

I don’t cry when watching many things.

That show did it to me…

…a bunch of times.

Just great.

And it was that way.

From start to finish.

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