This is Us: The Pandemic and Being Too Specific
The year 2020 is going to be very easy to spot in reruns.
Marriage, as any married person will tell you, is all about compromise1. The Duchess and I are simpatico on just about everything, with the glaring exceptions of travel (she loves it, I regard it as unnecessary and unhygienic) and what to watch on television. In our early days, I was kind of salty about this, in fact; the first time she turned to me and suggested we watch American Idol I think I smiled and laughed in delight at her little joke.
She was not amused2.
When she suggested Dancing with the Stars, I may have said some unwise things, and a little war broke out for a while, but we found our way to a compromise: I watch whatever The Duchess says we’re going to watch, and I provide an endless stream of sarcastic and passive aggressive remarks about it3. I still lose, though, because The Duchess actually enjoys my comments. I realize that I’m part of the show. I’ve become what I hate the most4.
Of course, this allows me to write essays about television shows I otherwise wouldn’t be able to. As a man who needs something to write about approximately 5 times a day for the rest of his life, this has turned out to be a godsend5. Instead of reading another book and being uninteresting, I watch terrible television and process it into 1,000 words peppered with footnotes. I may be a genius6.
That’s how, years later, I come inexplicably to write about This is Us, a show that is somehow still coasting on the mild surprise of a well-executed twist in its first episode in 20167. The show, if you’re unfamiliar, follows the Pearson family at different points in their lives. Focused mainly on the present, when the kids are about 40 years old, it flashes back to their childhood frequently and even occasionally flashes forward to the future.
It’s a television serial drama, and as such it’s beginning to sag under the weight of all the tragedies afflicting the Pearsons. Any serial drama tends to become a bit overstuffed after a while—I mean, at this point the Pearsons have dealt with multiple deaths, illnesses, betrayals, and intensely emotional epiphanies8. These people should be exhausted, but they keep on truckin’, because a series gotta series. But I’m not here to discuss the peculiar brand of family drama found on This Is Us, a show doomed to someday reveal it’s actually set in the year 3456 and the Pearsons are artificial intelligences constructed from ancient DNA by aliens curious to figure out why the human race died out9.
No, I’m here to discuss the purposeful dating of a story and how weird the decision was to explicitly set Season Five of the show in the 2020 pandemic.
I Watch TV to ESCAPE Real Life, Dude
Throughout Season Five of This Is Us, the COVID-19 pandemic is front and center. People wear masks, socially distance, and discuss the progress of the disease. The pandemic is a minor plot point here and there—a character’s business goes under due to the lockdown restrictions, for example—but blessedly there were no weepy plotlines involving people getting ill from it10. It was just there, in the background, just like it was for many of us in real life.
On the one hand, that certainly heightened the verisimilitude of the show. Ostensibly presented as a snapshot of real lives, it grounded the stories in a shared experience every single person watching would recognize. On the other hand, this means that Season Five of the show is now dated in a way the prior seasons weren’t—it’s absolutely fixed in time in 2020-2021, and fixed in a shared experience we will (hopefully) never share again. All fiction gets dated at some point, of course; read a story written in the 1920s and you might be baffled when people go into a small closet-like room to operate their telephone, and long-distance calls are initiated several hours before you’re actually connected. You can’t predict how things will shake out, and even minor details like flip phones or acoustic modems can mark your story as slightly vintage.
But readers and viewers are used to those sorts of creeping anachronisms. Life moves fast, and technology faster—as a famous Internet meme points out, about 66 years separates the Wright Brothers flight at Kitty Hawk and the goddamn Moon landing11—so we sort of unconsciously accept that in a TV show from the 1990s, for example, no one has a smart phone. But being dated like that is different because the story is still not rooted to a specific moment in time. You might watch Friends or Frasier and get that general 1990s vibe, but those shows very rarely scream THIS IS AUGUST, NINETEEN-NINETY SIX. This Is Us, on the other hand, is forever branded with a set of visuals that are already outdated (hopefully for good).
The Memory Hole
Of course, TV shows often vanish under the waves no matter how popular they were, especially if they’re serialized. Look at ER, which once commanded an audience of 46 million people for one episode, but today is barely mentioned and might not have existed at all save for its invisible influence on television drama12. It’s entirely possible that the showrunners for This Is Us aren’t too concerned about dating their series because there’s no expectation that there will be a future life for the show. It might be focused entirely on the present13.
As a writer, though, I worry about the staying power of my work. I’ve made some effort in my stories to avoid dating them too much—for a long time I avoided any sort of reference to technology in stories set more or less in the present day, because I wanted to avoid a “Gordon Gekko pulls out an absolutely ENORMOUS mobile phone” moment that might make a future reader throw a book across a room14. Even now, I often try to stay generic referring to “their phone” instead of a specific brand or platform, in order to avoid having characters walk around with the equivalent of tomorrow’s Palm Pilot or Blackberry15. In fact, when I wrote a story or two inspired by the pandemic last year (“inspired” seems like a weird choice of words in that context) I even made the plague generic and non-specific, focusing instead on aspects of it that seem to be evergreen based on historical accounts of other pandemics. If a story turns out well, I don’t want it to be forever dated as the COVID-19 Story.
But This Is Us went the other route, doubling-down on being extremely tied to 2020. If it does get re-run in the future, there’s gonna be a generation of people puzzled over the characters suddenly turning up in masks—and if you think the pandemic is going to be remembered forever, I’d remind you that most people were extremely surprised to discover that people had the same debate about wearing masks during the 1918 flu pandemic, and no one remembered until historians reminded us last year16. Stuff like that vanishes down the memory hole very fast. A bored kid booting up This Is Us on their AR eyeball implants in 2075 is going to be confused, trust me.
Verisimilitude is a double-edged sword, in other words. Building a fictional world that perfectly evokes reality is a real achievement, but it can tie your story to a time and place that is, of course, transient and increasingly unrecognizable to future audiences. It’s always going to be advisable to keep that in mind.
Is this approximately 1,000 more words than I ever thought I’d write about This Is Us? Yes. But that’s mainly because it took the show five years to be interesting.
Next: The classic musical that’s much more than it appears.
Also: Foot massages, but that’s another essay altogether.
To say I was punished for this transgression undersells the word punished. The punishment continues to this day, and ironically involves This Is Us.
Actually, after all these years the comments have become more openly aggressive and much less passive.
Even when I try to be mean, I am just naturally and overwhelmingly delightful.
For example, without This Is Us, this essay would have been about the only other thing I’m qualified to write about: Myself. You’re welcome. You’re also mean.
I know what you’re thinking, and again: You are mean.
Fair is fair, and I did indeed experience mild surprise when the “twist” was revealed. The possibility that I was distracted by a book I was reading simultaneously is strong.
This is a show that will show you the death of the beloved patriarch (SPOILERS) and then keep returning to the past to involve the character as if death has no meaning. Wait a second, is This Is Us a metaphysical study on the nature of time and existence? New essay coming in 3 … 2 … 1 … Wait, LOL, no it’s not.
I will lay this marker down right now: If that does indeed turn out to be the ending of this series, I will admit it was a work of genius and I am a crank.
To be clear: There ARE weepy plotlines — so, so many — but none of them involve someone on a respirator wishing they’d worn a fucking mask. Which also underscores the fact that everyone on this show is mildly liberal, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but something notable.
I just bought a new computer and it has no removable storage at all — no CD, DVD, or floppy disk. It freaks me out, man. All my stuff is just in some invisible mind palace out there. For perspective, I’m a person who was once thrilled to fit an entire 96kbps song in MP3 format on a 1.44 floppy. Shut up, I am cool.
The fact that everything I remember might be the result of The Mandella Effect is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever thought. Someone please text me that E/R actually existed and they remember it, too.
The good news for every TV showrunner is that no matter how badly you screw up the finale of your show, you can’t possibly be the Worst Ending Ever because HBO’s Game of Thrones exists.
Michael Douglas’ enormous cell phone in Wall Street is my favorite Aged Like Milk detail.
I should write a story about an idiot who mocked the first iPhone as ridiculous, as I did in 2008.
Those historians are the real heroes, since clearly more than half the country has never read a book and thinks Sinbad starred in a movie called Shazaam.
E/R? Dude, you’re tripping.