This Is Us: Eps 1 & 2

This Is Us is one of the collection of new fall shows I'm watching this season. I'll be upfront about it: Justin Hartley is only reason I decided to watch this show. I do not typically watch "just dramas." Normal people, real life... boring. I usually stick to genre. But I've wanted to see Justin get a real script that would actually push him instead of just calling for him to take his shirt off since Smallville.

So.

While it isn't a genre show, This Is Us does have a twist at its heart that makes it somewhat different from other shows you've seen. I can't tell you what it is because it'll ruin the whole first episode. And I really do believe in letting the experience of watching something occur unspoiled.

That said, the other interesting thing about This Is Us is Kate, the overweight woman you may have seen in the ads. She's not socially acceptable overweight, like a size 16 or something. She's very large, the kind that our society does not let pass without comment or ridicule. And seeing her on TV at all much less a leading role is pretty stunning.

The fact that she isn't the comic relief is practically unheard of.

In the second episode, she's invited to a Hollywood party and pressured to go, and she has this moment of thinking that everyone around her who is laughing is laughing at her. If you've never been the fat girl made fun of all your life, you probably don't have this reflex. I have this reflex. I have thought that exact thing. And while you don't know that it's about you all the time, you don't know that it isn't either and you're conditioned to believe that you are the butt of everyone's joke.

They got that moment so right.

Justin plays Kevin, a second rate actor whose show The Manny seems like not too far off and fairly biting commentary about Justin's own career. The Manny's fame is largely due to his taking his shirt off all the time, you see. And while he was on Smallville, I remember a distinct run of episodes where every time you saw Ollie for the first time in the ep... sweaty and half-naked. It actually started to feel exploitive, even to me, and I was rather enjoying the view.

So here he is on this show, playing an actor in that same circumstance. I don't know if they wrote the part for him or what. I do wonder if it stung at all. The saving grace being that the writing on This Is Us is actually great. And Kevin knows he's better than this and wants more than this.

There's something very meta about the whole thing.

Randall (Sterling K. Brown) is compelling just by being. He speaks and I want to listen. His midlife crisis? is as confusing to him as everyone else. But you can see that he needs something, even if it isn't clear what he needs. I'm loving his relationship with his wife, Beth, who has the best keeping-my-mouth-shut-but-broadcasting-my-opinion faces. They have an honesty in their communication that's refreshing. So much of our dramatic output revolves around poor communication and lies that witnessing the opposite... it seems so new.

This is a very long way of saying that this non-genre, normal people, "just drama" deserves your eyes. It might not be your thing. But it also, surprisingly, might.