This Is Us ends in a fittingly sentimental way

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"I didn’t expect to spend the This Is Us series finale smiling more than crying," says Caroline Siede. "After last week’s inventive, emotionally harrowing goodbye to Rebecca, 'Us' is a gentle denouement for the series—one last hug for the road. There’s little here that’s revelatory or artistically innovative. In fact, you could probably argue this episode slightly weakens the hour that came before it. (I would’ve just left Jack and Rebecca’s train bed conversation at the 'heys,' for instance.) But there’s a hell of a lot of charm and gentle humor to go around. And if any show has earned the right to a sentimental victory lap, it’s this one. This Is Us has always been defined by its mixture of simplicity and ambition. And while last week’s penultimate hour emphasized the latter, this episode embraces the former." Siede adds: "It’s a fittingly sentimental idea to end this uniquely sentimental series. As the peak TV bubble boomed over the past six years, This Is Us remained an earnestly old-fashioned beacon; a holdover from a time when network TV dominated the culture conversation. Yet the series has also been refreshingly thoughtful in its willingness to tell complicated, intergenerational stories about family, relationships, race, gender, addiction, loss, adoption, illness, abuse, PTSD, American history, and so much more. At its worst, This Is Us was a well-acted, slightly corny family drama. But at its best, it was something truly transcendent—a show that could fold time in on itself in ways both simple and complex. More so than maybe any other series I’ve ever watched, This Is Us embodies the idea that the more specific something is the more universal it becomes. And while its run may be over, I suspect This Is Us’ legacy will continue to live on for many more years to come."

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• This Is Us' series finale was all about appreciating small, quiet moments: "You think This Is Us can just throw us out into the cold, dry heaving into our wine glasses, distraught over a good-bye so emotional and gut-wrenching that we all end up being Kevin Pearson on that nice lady’s lawn, yelling 'I just need somebody to help me! I’m in pain here!'?" says Maggie Fremont. "No, it can’t. Well, technically, it can — we’ve allowed the show to be our emotional overlord for six seasons, and it has demonstrated more than once that it can decimate us by speech, montage, or single tear any time it wants. But This Is Us has decided to go out a different way. Instead of just gutting us one last time, This Is Us offers what feels like a reassuring handhold and a longing stare out a car window as it bids us farewell. In fact, appreciating small, quiet moments is really what this episode hammers home. Never forget: This Is Us loves a goddamn through-line."
• This Is Us' series finale combined two elements the series excels at portraying -- the mundane and the meaningful: "Wrapping up a 100-plus episode run is no easy task, particularly in an era in which network shows like This Is Us are becoming a thing of the past. Fogelman and the extended ensemble (shout-out to the casting team) can rest easy as they have stuck the landing," says Emma Fraser. "And thankfully, it didn’t give me a headache this time."
• Mandy Moore has been an acting revelation on This Is Us: "It shouldn’t have worked," says Kimberly Roots. "One look at Moore, who has been in her 30s for the series’ entire run, brings to mind words like 'dewy' and 'blooming' and 'what moisturizer does she use and where do I get some.' Her previous TV and film roles often played to that ethereal quality, like a terminally ill pastor’s daughter in A Walk to Remember, a doomed surgery patient on Grey’s Anatomy or a literal Disney princess in Tangled. Gathering up all of that youthful vigor and stuffing it under old-age prosthetics seems like a fool’s errand… except Moore absolutely made it work, and well. What a revelation it has been, over the course of the series’ run, to watch the pop star-turned-singer/songwriter-turned-actress absolutely nail whatever the show handed her." Emma Fraser adds that it's time to put some respect on Moore's name: "Mandy Moore has played Pearson matriarch Rebecca across at least seven decades, and she is, without doubt, the beating heart of the NBC drama," says Moore. "Other cast members have since joined Moore in the aging makeup process, but the actress is the only cast member that appears in each era."
• This Is Us was Black Mirror for overly emotional people: "What This Is Us excels at, possibly more than any other TV show, is its ability to make you sad to the very marrow regardless of who the sad things you're watching are happening to," says Kelly McClure. "This is achieved very simply by the makers of this show who know, in a very formulaic way, that it doesn't matter who dies when, or how, because we're going to be experiencing these deaths, and the aftermath of each, through the filter of personal experience. When we see Jack and Rebecca fall in love, go through ups and downs, and then die; we're seeing it all happen to the characters, but we're feeling it happen to the people we love in our own lives. And that's the kind of emotional manipulation I'm here for. That's why these people get the big bucks. I can envision the makers of this show fanning themselves with huge stacks of cash saying 'b***h and moan all you want, critics, but you WILL wail.'"
• Sterling K. Brown "cried like a baby" watching the finale: "I watched Episode 618, and I cried like a baby because I thought the show was good and I thought we ended well," he says. "And that’s what you hope for as somebody who remembers different series finales, fondly and otherwise, you hope to be in the category of the former. And so I had that feeling and then I had this feeling of like, it’s all done, I’ll never get a chance to do this again. And I felt painfully sad. And I called Dan (Fogelman) and just told him, 'You did it. You actually got a chance to see something through from beginning to end,' and said, 'How do you feel?' And I think he may have still had a few edits and post-production things, like VFX scenes to put in, but he said, “I feel good. I got a chance to do what I wanted to do.” But he’s already told us, and you hear it echoed in the show, just appreciating what it is while you’re still in the presence of it, so that you don’t spend all your time thinking, 'I wish I had actually enjoyed that more.' I think it made us all collectively, especially for the last four or five episodes, be like, “We’ve got to soak this **** in.” And so I feel like we did that, and I’m still real sad."
• Mandy Moore recalls crying filming the final Jack-Rebecca scenes: “Sweet Milo had a tissue ball underneath the pillow for me,” she explains. “Each take, Milo would very gingerly help me flip the pillow over so you didn’t see the tear stains. We were just trying to configure the pillow every take to make sure you couldn’t see where Mandy had been crying! He’d hand me my little wad of tissues to sop up the tears. It was so indicative of our relationship and the way we always supported each other and had each other’s back. It was effortless from the beginning, and it was effortless through the end. I acknowledge that I will never, ever have an on-screen partner like Milo again. It’s so rare to connect with someone on that level. In every way, this job was once in a lifetime.”
• This Is Us stars react to the series finale on social media: Mandy Moore quoted Rebecca Pearson in her farewell tweet: ”Take the risks. Make the big moves, even if they’re small moves. Forge ahead with your lives in any and every direction that moves you. I’m asking you to be fearless.”
• Creator Dan Fogelman explains the final shot of This Is Us: "It was between two, because they’re both pretty powerful," he says. "The final message of This Is Us, what the ending is all about and what the whole show has really been about, in a lot of ways, is a very simple promise that people who you lose live on through the people left behind. And that’s always been at the core of the show. We’re all going to, in our lives, inevitably experience great loss and great grief. And there is something about knowing that, in both little and big ways, they’ll live on with you. And it’s a bit of a hard thing to wrap your head around, but when you widen out — as the show has hopefully done by spanning multiple generations of the family — you can see the connective tissue and can see how the people you lose remain in the picture the entire time. And so I think that’s what the ending is about and it’s kind of what the final shot was saying."
• Did Fogelman receive any pushback for using the finale as a kind of epilogue?: "No, never any pushback. We’ve been given the creative freedom throughout this entire process," he says. "I always felt that this is the way I wanted the show to end. While the show always had twists and turns and big, gigantic moments and deaths of beloved characters, I felt that the show should end in the simplicity of family and trying to say something about that. Something that would help people leave a little bit uplifted and a little bit thinking about their own lives and their own families. That was always the intent. And I’m proud of the way we did it."
• Fogelman on filming series finale scenes four years ago: "I didn't have a backup plan, which made it really scary": It was only after Fogelman watched the footage years later that he felt a sense a relief. "That was my first moment of my shoulders going down a little bit and relaxing because I saw the footage that existed that we shot three to four years ago, and was like, 'Okay, we have it, it's really good,'" he recalls. "I knew that was gonna be the final shot of the episode. Lonny, watching his father watching the family, and I was like, 'Okay, we have it now,' and that relaxed me."
• Fogelman didn't use all the footage he shot four years ago: "Towards the opening of the finale, you see the three little kids waking up, intercut with the three adult kids waking up on the morning of their mother’s funeral," he says. "And then Jack’s voice calls them downstairs for breakfast. I recorded stuff that we barely scripted, Jack’s flipping pancakes and making pancakes and then intercut with Randall, his much younger family in the old house flipping pancakes and making pancakes. It was so charming, and it was speaking to the theme at the end of the episode — which is what the entire series has been about — that you carry this stuff forward with you without even thinking about it. But it was a little bit abstract. The kids were younger, you were in a different timeline with Randall and as cute as it was, I thought we spoke to it better at the end of the episode, and so I didn’t keep it but I was so charming and the kids are so young. and I think I’m going to put it online at some point.”
• Presenting everything that happened on This Is Us in chronological order