This Is Us' Season 3 premiere showed why its formula is hard to replicate
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This Is Us' premiere arrived Tuesday as three other network shows are borrowing heavily from the tear-jerker playbook. Yet This Is Us "used that reputation and expectation to prove why it is not only popular, but broadcast TV’s best drama, worthy of being in the same conversation as the best series on TV as a whole," says Kevin Fallon. In addition to being a pleasure to watch, he says, the NBC drama "has a strong sense of its identity, why people are tuning in, and it delivers that without pandering or patronizing. That’s a hard thing to do, and, for all the sledgehammer emotional twists the show is known for, proves it delicately." He adds: "The series manipulates emotions with the same meticulousness as a sitcom might set up jokes or an epic stage its most dramatic climaxes. That’s annoying to many people, which is fair, and why when This Is Us makes a misstep it is so monumentally hard to watch. There were moments like that in Tuesday night’s premiere, but, as a whole, it set up a season that will keep delivering the brand of drama that audiences have come to expect: sweeping romance, wrenching heartbreak, and the beauty in life’s most mundane; a show in which everyone is constantly feeling in huge, unexplainable ways, yet somehow always have the perfect speeches at the ready to articulate it."
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TOPICS: This Is Us, NBC, Dan Fogelman, Mandy Moore, Sterling K. Brown
