After 106 episodes, six seasons and gallons’ worth of shed tears worldwide, This Is Us is coming to an end. Since its debut in 2016, the timeline-twisting, heartstrings-pulling family drama has been a ratings and critical hit. As well as making stars out of the actors playing its central siblings – Sterling K Brown, Justin Hartley and Chrissy Metz – the show has been praised for its considered portrayal of grief, transracial adoption and mental health, and has the awards to show for it (four Emmys, two SAG Awards and a Golden Globe). Yet there’s an element of This Is Us that is often overlooked, and long overdue for recognition: one-time pop star turned actor and singer-songwriter Mandy Moore, who gives the performance of a lifetime as family matriarch Rebecca Pearson.
This Is Us tells the long, decades-hopping story of the Pearsons, a family originally comprised of married couple Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) and Rebecca, and their three children: twins Kevin (Hartley) and Kate (Metz), and adopted Randall (Brown), who was born on the same day and abandoned in the same hospital. After Jack’s sudden death in the late 1990s when the children are 18, the family are forced to reconsider their steady plans and adapt to a world without him. When we meet them in the pilot episode, it’s the mid-2010s and the “Big Three” are all grown up, celebrating their joint 36th birthdays. Through flashbacks, the audience sees the ways in which their lives have moved on since their loss, and how Jack’s death ended up shaping their respective adulthoods.
