Let me just begin and geek out by saying how I started the first season and binged it till the 3rd and now I am writing this review at 4:57 am, in my country and only because I could not 'not' share my review about this.
"This Is Us," is built around four characters who share the same birthday & it is a heartwarming and emotional story about the struggles and life of unique set of triplets and their wonderful parents.
This show celebrates the ordinary rhythms of family life, the unflashy joys of loving and being frustrated by your parents, or wanting to shoot the breeze with your siblings. It's also beautifully acted, most notably by Mandy Moore, Sterling K. Brown & Milo Ventimiglia. It validates it's characters' flaws and does not bow to hysterical dramatics, which the viewer's feel is something that makes it even more authentic!
In the age of Netflix and their cringy shows, I chose to watch This Is Us because it offers so much in so little, It talks about birth, death, career crisis, self-doubts, heart-to-hearts, reconciliations and never fails to make viewers feel something.
Possibly one of the best things in this show, is the ability of an American family to reach the hearts of audiences across the globe in a way that it manages to speak across cultures, resonate with audiences simply because of their characters and well thought storyline, being an Indian and having grown up in a completely different culture I can still feel the warmth of this show and appreciate it.
The first 4 seasons have just seemed perfect to me, 5th is where things really started going downhill.
Possibly the only reason I didn't give this a 10 and would have liked to give a 8.5, is that the buildup is so great but at times we don't get the adequate time to deal with the sudden buildup bursting within seconds. What I mean is, sometimes their buildup is so devastating that we would need a minute to react (and feel that the characters have reacted adequately) and the next second the scene has completely changed.
This is what turned out to be wrong with the beginning of the latest season(Season 5), even though it shows the transition to the almost apocalyptic pandemic society we seem to live in now, it throws at us emotions, situations and current happenings for the audiences to digest within a few scenes.
An amazingly executed drama, whose pilot should be enough to get you hooked because of it's own unique voice.
Edit: I have reviewed the beginning of Season 5 as well in this edit (first 5-6 episodes).
