This Is Us can be viewed as a companion piece to HBO’s The Leftovers

Vulture

“Here’s the thing: The show’s narrative engine runs on a much more significant premise than how and when certain characters leave this mortal coil,” Jen Chaney says of Jack’s death on This Is Us. The NBC drama, she adds,” is a show about the way loss reverberates over time and through the branches of a family tree. Although the two dramas differ radically in terms of tone and sensibility, in a way, This Is Us can be viewed as a more mainstream, less fantastical companion piece to The Leftovers. On a very micro level, This Is Us shows us what happens to people, over decades, after someone they deeply love suddenly departs. To its eternal credit, and unlike This Is Us, The Leftovers refused to give us answers about how those departures happened. It’s much harder to get away with that sort of thing on a broadcast network, but I don’t think This Is Us is interested in doing it anyway. The show is too gentle and kind at heart to allow its reality to get quite as harsh as The Leftovers did.”

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