'This Is Us' appreciation: The last great network drama

 Drumroll, please. After six seasons, 108 episodes, and enough time-shift storylines to fill 108 more, what may be the last great commercial network drama in TV history comes to an end May 24.

While there may be a "This Is Us" movie reunion someday and even a reboot, the NBC drama that upended network TV dramas is officially over. At least there are two episodes left to remind us just how radical that upending has been.

"This Is Us" was about so-called "moments," and butterfly effects, and the extraordinary within the ordinary. It was about the miracle of birth and death, and all the little miracles in between. It was a hopeless romantic that embraced mawkishness, defied cynicism, and saw hope for the future — and was effectively TV's balm for these troubled times.

To paraphrase Toby (Chris Sullivan) from a recent episode, this can't be how the story ends for such a hyper-realized, hyper-sensitized drama about everything. To paraphrase Kate (Chrissy Metz), this isn't. It's just that no one knows what comes next. At least the comforting message of "This Is Us'' was that no one ever does. 

    There's much to celebrate as this run comes to a close but that what-comes-next does seem like a reasonable place to start. "This Is Us" straddled the most momentous decades in television history. As streaming arrived in force, then en masse, the networks began to flatten and decline. The pandemic only accelerated changes that were already happening, and eulogies for golden age network comedies began to pile up — "The Big Bang Theory (2019), "Modern Family" (2020) and "black-ish" (2022).

Of network dramas, nothing new has survived since 2016 when "This Is Us"' launched, aside from the stray procedural or quasi-knockoff ("A Million Little Things''). Other than "Grey's Anatomy" — which occupies an otherworldly class all its own — the commercial networks no longer seem to know how to nurture, let alone launch, water cooler franchises. If "This Is Us" is to be the last of them, there may be an object lesson in it. 

The show was created by Dan Fogelman, a Hollywood journeyman who had written some big-screen hits ("Cars," "Crazy Stupid Love") and one resounding small-screen flop (the WB's "Like Family" from 2002). By effectively blending what worked ("Crazy Stupid Love") with what didn't ("Like Family"), Fogelman improbably came up with "This Is Us." 

His reasoning was, why shouldn't a prime-time drama be about a racially blended family, which was precisely what his long-forgotten WB sitcom was about? Why not a drama with the conventions of a big-screen rom-com? Why not one with trick endings, cliffhangers and time shifts? 

Why not a big-hearted, hokey, Norman Rockwell of a series that celebrates that which unites us instead of that which divides us?

Some critics at first were unimpressed (I certainly was) but they came around in time. They had no choice. "ThisIis Us"' was almost instantly a monster hit, and the monster only grew, averaging over 17 million viewers by the second season. The numbers cooled off from there, but not by much. Signs of mortality finally arrived during the fifth season — ironically, the most ambitious of the entire series run and in some ways the best — and Fogelman planned for the endgame. He was smart about that too because TV shows this intricate (and at times confounding) have a habit of quickly turning into parodies of themselves. 

Over these past six seasons, "This Is Us" has followed the lives of the three Pearson siblings, Kevin (Justin Hartley), Kate and Randall (Sterling K. Brown) — known as the Big Three- and their mom Rebecca (Mandy Moore) and father Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) through flashbacks and flashforwards. Kate and Kevin were surviving members of triplets, and Randall was adopted by the family. In flash-forward, viewers learned by the second season that Jack had died when the kids were 17, while Rebecca would eventually marry Jack's best friend, Miguel Rivas (Jon Huertas).

Unusual if not unprecedented for a prime-time drama, the past, present and future were woven through storylines, episodes and whole seasons. The show used the device to explore family dynamics and histories set against the broader tableau of recent American history, like Vietnam in the early seasons, and Black Lives Matter, George Floyd and the pandemic in the fifth. The device was also used to explore (and at times expiate) racial injustice, body shaming and substance abuse. The fraught world of the Pearsons was, on some immediate level, meant to reflect our fraught world as well, hence the title. 

    But this final season stepped back and took the TV version of a deep breath. 

In effect, that meant getting back to basics and for "This Is Us," those basics sometimes read like something out of a New Age manifesto: In between birth and death, there are countless moments for each of us, some good, some bad, but for those who believe that love is stronger than hate, these moments will find meaning, then unexpectedly — or miraculously — they will find you. 

     "This Is Us" was TV's greatest champion of the Moment, the smaller the better. Nothing could be too small or inconsequential. 

    How (for example) could a leaky pipe in Kate and Toby's house in the fifth season lead directly to their blowout and subsequent divorce in the sixth? (Recall that Toby had to rush to fix that leak which had grown into a torrent — leaving toddler Jack unattended, with nearly catastrophic consequences.)

In the world of "This Is Us," the logic is both impeccable and necessary. 

Indeed, this past season has reinforced all the deeper themes of the series, or at least the most reductive ones which is that small things can lead to big things but no one in the moment can possibly know what (or when) those will be.

As always, there were heart-squeezing climaxes that came out of these many moments. A few felt manipulative — "This Is Us" certainly loved excess — but the best ones felt earned. For example, there was that transfixing scene in the sixth episode when (Randall's wife) Beth (Susan Kalechi Watson) joins the ballet dancer on stage who had just fallen during a solo performance. 

There was Jack's moving eulogy to his mother and Toby's moving eulogy to his marriage.

There was that sleepless night where Kevin sat alongside ex-Marine Cassidy Sharp (Jennifer Morrison) suffering from PTSD (PTSD was just one of many of those issues this series explored with such grace and sensitivity.)

And then, there was May 3's "Miguel."   Surprisingly (except to fans) Billy Joel had an off-screen role in this one. Earlier in the season and years in their past, Becca and Miguel admitted they shared a favorite Billy song ("She's Always a Woman") while a luckless suitor said he preferred another ("Piano Man.") So much for that guy.

 But in the closing moments of "Miguel," and as the Pearsons gathered beneath the tree Miguel had planted to help in her recovery from dementia, another Billy Joel song began to track: 

"And so it goes, and so it goes/And you're the only one who knows …" 

A tear-jerker (what else?) but also another one of those earned moments. Miguel was gone and Rebecca may be gone in a couple of episodes, too. Millions of fans will have a good cry when that happens. And so it goes.