Can ‘This Is Us’ Stop Jerking Us Around For A Hot Minute?

Warning: Spoilers for last week’s episode of This Is Us follow.

Can we have some real talk for a second? I know you’re a fan of This Is Us; I am, too. You cheered when Sterling K. Brown won his Emmy, and cried when you saw the burnt-out hulk of the Pearson house in this year’s season premiere, knowing that’s likely how Jack Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia) died.

But, let’s be honest: You’re tired of getting jerked around, aren’t you? I certainly am. I can’t deal anymore with the emotional twists and turns that Dan Fogelman and his writers put us through every single week, mostly at the end of episodes, where we’ve emotionally bought into a story and just can’t take having the rug pulled out from under us again. It’s just infuriating, maddening, and — auuuugggh! Why can’t we just enjoy a well-acted, well-plotted show for just one week and leave it at that?!

Last week’s episode might have been the last straw for me. The first of the “Big 3” trilogy (i.e. the “Emmy Bait Episodes”), we see Kevin (Justin Hartley) spiraling out of control, continuing to drink and pop Vicodin as he travels back east to accept an award from his old high school. He generally acts like an asshole, bedding down an accomplished fellow alumni who had a crush on him, talking to himself as he relives the play back in high school that ruined his promising football career, and generally does most of the self-possessed Kevin things that made us love to hate him so much.

But we also see how, when he was a kid, he was the kid caught in the middle. Jack doted on Kate, and Rebecca (Mandy Moore) paid attention to Randall. Everyone thought Kevin could handle things on his own. They were wrong, and they found that out after Kevin’s knee was wrecked, setting him adrift. So we’re starting to see why Kevin is so down on himself as an adult.

The plot, and Hartley’s performance, sucked me in. He realizes he’s in trouble, comes to Randall’s house, starts to thank him, and he says, “Kate lost the baby.”

Wait… What?

Why did we need to know that at the close of what was a well-written, well-acted episode? Didn’t Kate (Chrissy Metz) just get pregnant? Weren’t we going to explore how she handles it? How Toby (Chris Sullivan) handles it? Now all of a sudden we have to deal with another fucking gut punch?

Was that twist really necessary? Of course, it was used as an entry into the second episode of the trilogy, where we find out how Kate is handling the loss. But the twist didn’t need to be there; we could have had Kate lose the baby at the end or even the middle of her episode, or just be matter-of-fact about it and have her miscarry in the first scene of her episode. The twist just didn’t need to be there.

It feels like Fogelman has gotten “M. Night Shyamalan Disease,” and got so hooked on the twist of the pilot, where we find out that the Kate, Kevin and Randall were Jack and Rebecca’s kids, that he has to put a twist in almost every episode in order to hold the audience. Let me just give Dan the message right now: YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THAT ANYMORE. We’re invested in the show. We love the characters. We don’t need to be jerked around.

Just let This Is Us be, ok? We just want to enjoy an episode without being concerned about what emotional wallop is just around the corner. What are we going to be in for tonight with Kate? We don’t know. But what we do know is this: We’re really worried that Randall might have cancer and we’ll find out at 9:59 ET tonight. Just sayin’.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

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