https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz3iu06uQOs
Tonight at 9p on NBC, This Is Us delivers another intense and powerful episode. Toby (Chris Sullivan) and Kate (Chrissy Metz) have finally decided to get know each other better before they tie the knot in the summer and he asks her how her father died. Will she tell him (and ultimately us) what happened? Randall’s (Sterling K Brown) father (Ron Cephas Jones) is getting sicker and it is too much for him to handle. It is also Kevin’s (Justin Hartley) opening night for his play and he is nervous about it. He will seek out help and get good advice from someone he never expects that will give him the confidence he needs to take the stage. But is it enough? Then there is Jack (Milo Ventimilgia) and Rebecca (Mandy Moore), and their marriage is in trouble. Is this a sign of when everything came crashing down for them? You will just have to tune in to find out.
We know what is going on on the show, but what are five things you don’t about the drama that reminds us that we can all love television again.
1 – We love Mandy Moore and Milo Ventimilgia as the matriarch and patriarch of the Pearson Family, but one of them was not what the creator was looking for for the part. Dan Fogelman revealed this tidbit at NBC’s TCA Winter Press Tour Day, “I had Mandy very much in mind as both a type and an actor, but I had a very different conception of Jack…coming in. I thought he was more of, like, not a nebbish, is the right word. Milo came in to meet with us, and…he had a huge beard and really long hair, and he had a motorcycle helmet. And he was so alpha that it was intimidating. It was not quite what I had in my brain as a type.” Then he added. “Right away I kind of knew, and I was, like, ‘No, that’s it.’ And then we were, like, ‘That’s the dad of this family, the hinge. That’s the before and after,’ and then everything else kind of started there, actually. But yeah, it was, like I had a type in mind who wouldn’t be as comfortable having his ass on television and like me.”
2 – Fogelman and Moore knew each other before This Is Us because he co-wrote her movie Tangled, but who else knew each other beforehand? Brown and his TV wife also have a connection. He explained to us how he and Susan Kelechi Watson have known each other for decades, “Susan and I both went to grad school for acting at NYU. And I was a third year when she was a first year, so we overlapped in school together. So we’ve known each other for a while and have a similar sort of approach to the work.”
3 – Brown also knew his TV biological father beforehand from a reading in NYC, and it is someone that Ron Cephas Jones knows that shapes his character. He shared his heartbreaking inspiration for how William Hill goes through his cancer battle, “My best friend has stage 4 cancer, and he lives here in L.A. So I speak with him every other day. So a lot of those facial expressions and emotions come directly from my friend.”
4 – Talking about faces, how long does it take for Mandy Moore to age 30 years? She said, “We’ve gotten the time down quite a bit. It’s now, like, three and a half hours as opposed to five, initially.” Does she mind sitting in the chair for that long? Not at all because she is loving this job and will do anything for it!
5 – We are loving the show and we know it a two season pickup. Does Dan Fogelman have an end date for the drama? He told us, “I know where the show goes. I have a number of seasons in my brain, and we’ll see as we get there. In success, people are always going to want more. In failure, people are going to want many less. I know where the series goes for multiple, multiple seasons. Beyond that, in terms of an overriding number, I don’t really have them in my head.”
If This Is Us keeps giving us episodes like the ones that that they have been giving us all season long, it is good to know that they have many more seasons ahead of them to come because we don’t want it going anywhere anytime soon.
