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here’s no getting around it: This Is Us is the most intentionally poignant series that’s ever aired on television. Episodes of the NBC drama usually have a weep-rate of about 25 percent, which is to say that every fourth scene or so has you mewling, whimpering, or all- out blubbering. This makes This Is Us, at 42 minutes per episode and 18 episodes per season, a physically trying experience. Binge-watch it and that lump in your throat becomes a painful companion.

And yet Americans adore it. They really adore it. With some 15 million viewers tuning in every week, This Is Us is a cultural phenomenon. It’s the first non-cable series in almost a decade to break through into the popular culture, win a huge audience, and suggest there’s still life in network television.

What explains our seeming masochism?

For one thing, This Is Us is ingeniously designed. In the first episode, we meet Jack and Rebecca Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia and Mandy Moore), a white working-class Pittsburgh couple expecting the birth of triplets. When Rebecca goes into labor (on Jack’s own birthday), only two babies—a boy and a girl—survive the trials of birth. So Jack and Rebecca decide almost immediately to adopt an infant who was born on the same day and left at a local firehouse.

We also meet Kevin (Justin Hartley), a soulless sitcom star with surfer good looks; Kate (Chrissy Metz), a frustrated singer struggling with obesity; and Randall (Sterling K. Brown), a successful African-American weather-derivatives trader and a perfectionist husband and father of two.

Viewers realize only at the very end of the episode that the parallel stories they’ve been following involve the same family—three decades apart. Just before the credits roll, we are made to understand that Jack and Rebecca’s birth drama takes place in 1979, while the Kevin, Kate, and Randall stories are unfolding in the present. And we grasp then that Kevin and Kate are the thirtysomething versions of the Pearsons’ two surviving triplets, and Randall is their adopted brother. Every following episode is built on a similarly nonlinear, time-hopping structure. Like other ambitious works, This Is Us teaches its audience how to understand its narrative design as it goes along.

As the shared birthday of father and children indicates, This Is Us is shot through with an element of mystical human connection. The story of the Pearsons isn’t driven quite by magical realism, but by miraculous (and poetically meaningful) coincidence. We come to find out, for example, that the fireman who brought Randall to the hospital saved his own marriage by virtue of the baby’s appearance, and that the widower doctor who delivered Kevin and Kate was so moved by the day’s events that he scrapped his suicide fantasies and decided to get on with life.

The prevailing sense of the miraculous is fitting because This Is Us is, in fact, a sprawling fantasy. And it’s a fantasy of a type we’ve not seen before. The show is not a mythological romance of wizards and dragons; it doesn’t offer viewers the vicarious thrill of the billionaire set. This Is Us is a sociological fantasy that sells becalming politico-cultural escapism to an American populace in the throes of culture war. The Pearsons live in a universe where the goal of human existence is to connect to the most diverse group of people one can find and accept them as family. Characters with dissimilar identities and conditions are layered in, episode by episode, and grafted on to the Pearson family tree.

By the time the Pearson Christmas rolls around (10 episodes in), the demographic variety of the clan is exhaustive. There are the white Pearsons and the black Pearsons. There are the obese Pearsons (obesity being Kate and her fiancé’s most salient identity in the show). There’s Kevin’s Jewish girlfriend. There’s Miguel, Rebecca’s Latino second husband. And then there’s William, Randall’s biological father (Ron Cephas Jones), who is—get ready for it—a black, geriatric, bisexual ex-junkie dying of cancer. William’s white British boyfriend is, naturally, also in attendance.

William, the fading embodiment of the 20th century’s social struggles, is something of a secular saint. He speaks softly, rarely, and with wisdom. But it’s Randall who is the show’s moral spine and the personification of its 21st-century American ideal. A successful black man raised by white parents, he’s brilliant, handsome, accomplished, and so fundamentally virtuous that he occasionally suffers breakdowns from bearing the burdens of others. His wife is strong and beautiful, and his two daughters are adorable. And since Jack’s death, the cause of which is an enduring show mystery, he’s been serving loosely as paternal anchor for the entire family. It is at his grand suburban house, after all, that the Pearson mosaic comes together for Christmas.

Randall cannot but put one in mind of Barack Obama, both the real man and the mythical version created by his devotees. The similarities are too great to dismiss—he even has a casually racist white grandmother. Indeed, This Is Us is best understood as a chronicle of life in the idyllic America that Obama summoned in his keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America,” Obama said. “There’s the United States of America.” He described a land of “small miracles” where “we worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states,” and where “we coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.”

Obama spoke those words, and they were beautiful. That he went on to govern in more divisive ways isn’t the point. It was that earlier Obama and his astonishing vision of the country that captured so many. And it’s the vision that 15 million Americans seek out every week to forget about the real 2017 America, where we disparage “thoughts and prayers” in the blue states and have a kind word for Vladimir Putin in the red states, and where we embrace the NFL in the blue states and boycott it in the red states, and so on. This Is Us shows an America that was supposed to have manifested by now and, painfully, didn’t. Its title is even a kind of paraphrase of one of Obama’s whispered admonishments about our national character. This is who we are!

So Americans weep while watching the series, at least in part, cathartically. They’re having a healthy cry over our actual state of affairs. But this is facilitated by the exquisitely fragile goodness of the show’s characters. The most emotional moments on This Is Us don’t arise out of tragedy per se, but rather out of acts and words of almost unbearable virtue coming from those in the grip of tragedy. Here’s part of the shattering deathbed speech that William makes to Randall, explaining that his long, cruel existence was worth it because he had a kind mother in childhood and a loving son in old age:

You deserve the beautiful life you’ve made. You deserve everything, Randall. My beautiful boy, my son. I haven’t had a happy life. Bad breaks, bad choices. A life of almosts and could haves. Some would call it sad, but I don’t. ’Cause the two best things in my life were the person in the very beginning and the person at the very end. And that’s a pretty good thing to be able to say, I think.

To say that This Is Us manipulates one’s emotions would be like saying that hardcore pornography manipulates its viewers’s instincts.  Manipulation suggests subtle handling. The show doesn’t waste time merely manipulating; it acts almost surgically on our chemical systems to induce a desired physiological state. When it’s all over, viewers are left limp, spent, and certain they’ll be back for more.

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