This Is Us to end with Season 6, fulfilling creator Dan Fogelman's plan

The Hollywood Reporter

The news from The Hollywood Reporter that This Is Us is ending next season, which NBC is expected to formally announce with its 2021-2022 schedule on Friday, shouldn't come as a surprise. When NBC renewed This Is Us for three more seasons in May 2019, Fogelman said that Season 6 would likely be the last. “We’re roughly in the middle of where the television series is going to go,” Fogelman said at the time. “We never set out to make a television series that was going to last 18 seasons, so we have a very direct plan. I have script pages I have written and I’m writing that really are deep, deep, deep into the future. We have a plan for what we’re going to do, and I know what the plan is.” According to The Hollywood Reporter's Lesley Goldberg, "while an official count has yet to be determined, it’s expected that the final season will consist of around 18 episodes, likely enough to carry the series over the 100-episode threshold typically needed to secure a lucrative off-network syndication deal and triggering a cash infusion for Fogelman and Disney, which now owns the series after closing its $71.3 billion Fox deal a few years ago. That would create yet another revenue stream after Disney-owned Hulu in 2017 acquired SVOD rights to This Is Us in what sources at the time said was a record-breaking per-episode fee. Hulu and NBC shared co-exclusive rights to the series."