This Is Us has turned the tragedy of Jack's death into a tease

The Atlantic

“Where is the line,” asks Megan Garber, “between dramatization and exploitation? Between the kind of manipulation that all fiction—and particularly the fiction of the primetime television series—will engage in, and the kind that can become cynical, and trying, and exhausting? This Is Us is a show that is, for the most part, exceptionally sensitive, exceptionally subtle. But the way it has played with Jack’s death—the central fact of its characters’ lives, a trauma that radiates across their experience in ways both predictable and deeply unruly—is not subtle at all. It is bold. It is brash. It suggests, indeed, writers at play. Jack’s demise, as a result, has been a tragedy that has manifested as something far more banal: a plot device. An earnest one, yes—Jack is evidently beloved by his creators as well as his fellow Pearsons—but a plot device nonetheless.”