"This Is Us": This Is It

The series finale of the NBC family drama "This Is Us" airs tomorrow after six seasons of compelling stories with wild flashbacks and flash-forwards and all of the trials and tribulations of the incredibly complex Pearson family.  They're not a typical family - there aren't that many families whose two sons become a Hollywood actor and a U.S. Senator, least of all when one is transracially adopted, nor are there a lot of families where a transracially adopted son has two fraternal twin siblings and was born on the exact same date as they were - but they do have a lot of typical family issues that they have to deal with.  The time shifts in the storylines have always been used very effectively.  By the end of each episode, you're surprised to learn what has happened, but you have to wait awhile to learn how it happened. 

All through the run of "This Is Us," the heart of the series has been Mandy Moore, who played Rebecca Pearson, the family matriarch.

When Mandy Moore first arrived at the turn of the millennium, she was a teenage pop singer in the style of Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson.  This is not a lineage any chanteuse worth her salt would want to be associated with, and I groaned at the prospect of yet another teen-pop sensation.  But something funny happened - Mandy Moore turned out to be talented,  Not only is she a fine singer, she piqued my interest as an actress as the starry-eyed but conniving talent-show contestant Sally Kendoo in the 2006 satirical film American Dreamz.  Her performance as Rebecca in "This Is Us" has been nothing short of outstanding. As a mother and wife who gives up her (big surprise) singing career to raise her children, she ends up being the rock of her family, the constant in changing situations that become more and more frequent after her husband dies from inhaling to much smoke in a house fire that displaces the family. Moore played the role with the right mix of spunk, humor and pathos.  She was the biggest reason to watch the show.  (The very close second biggest reason to watch was Sterling K. Brown, who played adopted son Randall; he could give a great performance just by reciting the phone book . . . if you can find a phone book these days.  Thanks for nothing, Whitepages.com.)

I'll certainly be watching the series finale of "This Is Us" tomorrow, but I wonder what producer Dan Fogelman could possibly have left to surprise us with.  After the tearjerking penultimate episode last week, which showed Rebecca dreaming of the people in her life gone by aboard a luxurious passenger train as she fights to stay alive before she ultimately succumbs to her terminal Alzheimer's disease,  I can only wonder.

Tuning In

I thought I'd never again write about television, as I don't watch much of it these days, but I have been watching a couple of shows during the 2016-17 season, and I have a few things to say about them, plus a couple of others, on this Christmas Eve.  I would have gotten to it sooner, but the election (which is finally over) kept getting in the way. 

Perhaps the brightest and most endearing new show of the 2106-17 season is "This Is Us," an NBC drama about an extended family.  In case you haven't been hiding under a rock lately, "This Is Us" follows a young white couple, Jack and Rebecca Pearson, two fraternal twins named Kevin and Kate, and a black man named Randall, who was adopted by a family after being abandoned in a firehouse by his birth father.   Everyone knows the twist by now: Jack and Rebecca are the parents of the twins and the adoptee, and flashbacks reveal how they grew up, with Kevin becoming a television actor, Kate dealing with a weight problem (and finding a boyfriend, Toby, who's also dealing with a weight problem) and Randall becoming a New York trader and living in a posh neighborhood in northern New Jersey.  We see how the family members love each other and deal with crises and moments of truth, like when Randall finds his biological father, and other plot twists you don't see coming that seem to leap out of nowhere.

One unresolved plot twist so far: Jack turns out to have died many years ago, but we don't know when he died or what he died of.  We only know that Kate keeps his ashes in her apartment.

I have to give a shout-out to Mandy Moore, who plays Rebecca, the family matriarch.  People who remember her as a teen pop singer at the turn of the millennium already know that she was one of the few teenage stars of the time who had genuine singing talent, and they probably knew she could act as well, but in "This is Us," she gives some heartwarming and winning performances that demonstrate just how much she's matured the sixteen years since she turned sixteen.  (Yes, Mandy Moore is 32 now.  Doesn't that make you feel old?)

Is  "This Is Us" the new "Parenthood"?  Not really - for one thing, it's darker and more unsettling than Jason Katims' much-missed show about the Braverman clan - but it's definitely a satisfying and even spellbinding series, always ready to surprise you once you think you have it figured out.

One show I wish I had time for - I don't have time for it because I'm writing this blog - is ABC's "Designated Survivor," starring Kiefer Sutherland as a low-level Cabinet secretary in Washington  who suddenly becomes President of the United States, when his predecessor and the rest of the Cabinet are killed in a terrorist attack during the State of the Union address.  My mother likes it.  I'll have to binge-watch it through On Demand in the near future.  One ABC show I could do without is "Speechless," about a nutty mom whose life revolves around accommodating her children and especially her older son, who suffers from cerebral palsy and needs a typewriter keyboard to communicate.  Minnie Driver plays the mom, and she somehow fails at being a sympathetic character; moreover, she seems to be re-creating her hovering-mother persona from her role in "About a Boy" (a much better show, but Nielsen families decided otherwise) to the point of phoning it in.  And this is Minnie Driver - probably one of the best British actresses of her generation - that we're talking about.

And old ABC favorites?  I'm still a fan of "The Middle," but "Modern Family" got so tiresome and predictable,  I just stopped watching.  I haven't been compelled to catch up on it.  I have a job that requires me to periodically work on Wednesday nights, so I miss "Modern Family" a lot anyway, but when I have the opportunity to see it on On Demand, I just can't be bothered.  Both "The Middle" and "Modern Family" are both about family units that get into unenviable situations, but you sympathize with the Hecks on the former show because they're lower-middle-class Midwesterners without many prospects.  The Pritchetts and the Dunphys on the latter show are upper-middle-class elitist Southern Californians who exhibit all the smugness that applies, and it's hard to laugh when they get into trouble when you know they still live well in the end.  

Or to explain it in a political way, the Pritchetts and the Dunphys behave like centrist Democrats, while the Hecks are blue-collar populists.  And we all know who won that battle.