Today I’ve written a piece for The Washington Post on the new hit show “This Is Us,” and what the success of this powerful drama can teach us.
Here’s an excerpt:
The secret to “This Is Us” is less about ogling some other, strange, dysfunctional family as it is about seeing in it our own.
This is where the time-hopping of the program is essential to its emotional power. Some of the adults in the show, like workaholic family man Randall, seem to have most things together, while others — like sister Kate scarfing down powdered doughnuts in her car at the gas station or brother Kevin losing his job after melting down on his brain dead sitcom — do not.
At the same time, though, we see them as children, and we see there’s not all that much distance between the two. We see a glimpse of the way the decisions made in private of a young couple who never planned to be parents reverberate through the years in the lives of their offspring.
This rings true because we all tend to see our lives as narrative and, like the characters in this series, the narrative is often murkier than we would like.
Read the entire article here.
