
Every once in a while a TV show comes along with enough power and heart to infiltrate your everyday life and make you see the world differently.
This Is Us, the Emmy and Golden Globe-winning drama that beautifully weaves together themes of love, loss, parenthood and grief, is one such show.
The series follows the lives of siblings Kevin (Justin Hartley), Kate (Chrissy Metz) and Randall (Sterling K Brown) and their parents Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) and Rebecca Pearson (Mandy Moore) . The storyline takes place in the present day and in the past via a series of flashbacks.
It’s a story device that allows viewers to witness every pivotal moments in this families’ life. And now that it’s on DVD, we can go through all the feels with them again – or for the first time.
Through the tears and laughs that watching This Is Us always brings, five women share how a show this cathartic series has changed their lives (including myself).
Laura Brodnik
Watching This Is Us has made me value my family more.
Not that it has changed the way I love them, it’s more about valuing the time I have with them and the way we communicate with each other even in the smallest, most everyday ways.
Watching the Pearson family go through the extreme highs and lows of life, in a story that crosses two different generations, has shown me that there are many different ways for families to be there for one another.
The characters on This Is Us have been faced with death, illness and estrangement from each other and yet they always come back to one another in the end. That is the element of this show that has really driven home the importance of family to me.
Sara Cecil
As someone who is adopted I really relate to the adoption storyline in This Is Us. The idea of knowing you were adopted your whole life and the teasing and the disconnect you can sometimes feel around that was explored really well in the show.
Another idea that was explored in the show that I really related to was the idea that you sometimes resent your siblings who are the biological children in the family.
My biological family also have addictive tendencies, so Kevin’s recent addiction problem in the series, along with seeing how something like that can be genetic, also resonated with me. As an overweight woman I also love watching Kate and her journey to self-acceptance.
Watching these characters has changed my life.
