"This Is Us": We loved the Pearsons for the same reason they annoyed us. Because they ARE us.
I guess that title was right all along
Before I write this brief essay about our love of a fictional family, I want to say that I’m so sorry and grieving and torn and shattered for several real families who sent their kids to school yesterday and didn’t see them come home. I am so blisteringly angry at the people who will rush to blame this on everything they can so they don’t have to change everything and can keep taking a check from the people who created the guns. I am so frustrated at the people we elect and make rich who are like “Oh, golly, gee, what can we do?”
We are lost. Because the people in charge burned the maps and then tried to insist that they never existed.
OK. On to the fake people.
When I think about “This Is Us,” I think about Rory Gilmore, and why she didn’t know she was terrible.
Let me explain.
Rory, one-half of the titular “Gilmore Girls,” was, on the surface, the perfect child. And if she ever forgot it, there were about ten people anywhere she went in the fictional town of Stars Hollow to remind her. Beautiful. Brainy. Beloved by all. Rory had it all, including an absolute inability to take responsibility for anything wrong she ever did, because as far as she knew she was perfect. Everybody says so!
Every one of Rory’s failures was blamed on something else - pressure. Her mother. Her boyfriend marrying someone else. Her other boyfriend having another girlfriend but it being OK because she got to fly to fancy places to have sex with him. That boyfriend’s dad telling her she didn’t have what it took to make it in journalism, or anyone who ever hinted that she wasn’t the most special-ist special that ever specialed. There were times that the writers seemed to understand that Rory was a spoiled ingrate who had made the transition from golden child to lost adult because no one ever let her feel bad about anything, but by the finale of the ridiculous four-part special that ended the thing, it was apparent that Rory didn’t know that she was ridiculous because the writers didn’t. And that ruined it for me.
“This Is Us,” on the other hand, knew that its central family, the Pearsons, could be ridiculous. And that’s why it worked.
When the show, which concluded last night, first started, I felt seen because the Pearsons were a multi-racial family that included adoption. My family is one of those families, not just the one I created but the one I grew up in. There are many, many families like that, and always have been, and it was amazing to be acknowledged. And as the show went on, it also included, as completely normal, subjects like widowhood, racism, weight loss and fat phobia, infidelity, sexual identity and the realization that your dream job…isn’t.
But after a while, “This Is Us”’s greatest strength was that it wanted you to love the Pearsons without trying to gaslight you into believing that they were always right. They had the guts to present Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) as an amazing father and husband but also a guy whose temper and demons from an abusive upbringing made him unable to forgive his brother for a thing he actually didn’t do. And then he cut that brother out of his life and didn’t even tell his kids he existed. We were made to understand why he did that. But the show never made any excuses for the fact that this was wrong. And it felt right, because we have been that wrong, in some way.
Ditto Kate’s (Chrissy Metz) inability to understand how to talk to her Black brother Randall (Sterling K. Brown) about race, mostly because he’d been swallowing his hurt and pain because she and their brother Kevin (Justin Hartley) never really asked him about it. And their parents Jack and Rebecca (Mandy “Where Is Her Emmy” Moore) were fine parents who also weren’t quite sure how to raise a Black child because they didn’t know enough about being Black because the world had never told them they had to. This did not make them bad people. It just made them not always right.
The Pearsons were wrong all the time. And it was OK. That’s what made them relatable. I loved this people, even when they irritated me, because they were flawed. And the show allowed them to be flawed and didn’t insult us by pretending that they weren’t. I never felt gaslit. I felt seen. I, too, am messy and ragey and wrong. A lot. Ask anyone. And it’s OK to tell me.
They were us.
This was us.
"This Is Us": We loved the Pearsons for the same reason they annoyed us. Because they ARE us.
Yes to all of this! Especially the Rory stuff. I am so glad I'm not alone. She was so annoying (her mom wasn't much better). LOL This is exactly why I love/loved "This is Us". They were completely flawed, and never tried to act like they weren't. I know some folks were irritated by this, but it reminded me of my own crazy family, and so I could relate. I will miss the Pearsons! And yes, Mandy deserves an Emmy!
Great read!