Why This Is Us opened Season 4 by introducing so many new characters in a disorienting way
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The NBC drama premiered with a bunch of new characters to worry about, including those played by newcomers Jennifer Morrison, Asante Blackk, Nick Wechsler and Omar Epps. "It was always part of the plan for a while now, which was in the middle of our run," explains This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman. "We were going to introduce some new characters in an unusual way that take our main characters off course, or in a new direction. When you’re coming into it fresh as a fan of the show, you’re watching it and hopefully engaging with the new characters and wondering, 'Where are these people and who are they going to cross with and how?'… But then there’s a part where hopefully that drifts away and you’re just in the stories. And then it’s such a relief — for me, at least — when you see the Big Three come back in and you realize, 'Oh, I’ve gotten to meet these characters on their own without viewing them through the prism of Randall and Kevin and Kate. Now I understand a little bit more about who these people are and I’m seeing the beginnings of the connection between characters, so I’m ready to go on a ride and see how these now fully formed characters in my mind’s eye will enter our world.' Normally you would meet characters through the eyes of your main characters, which always gives you a little bit of a skewed perspective, because you’re meeting them through our characters. But that’s not how you meet strangers in real life. The first time you meet the person who becomes your husband or wife or your new boss or your business partner, they’ve had a whole life before you and the meeting with them is your first experience of them. So I wanted to give the audience that feeling of getting to know these people before you got to know them in relation to our main characters."
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TOPICS: This Is Us, NBC, Dan Fogelman, Griffin Dunne
