This Is Us

At the end of episode six, one of three  36-year-old siblings speaks the words from which the title comes.  He's showing his two nieces a painting he made and talking about how the interconnected squiggles on the page represent the whole big messy family of humans, all connected to each other, including those who have died and those never met who immigrated here and started the family tree. "This is us, this is all of us," he says.

This is one of the best series about family I've seen, an artfully-written screenplay, well-acted.  The young mother reminds me of  Joy back when we were twenty-something friends.

In the first episode, she's pregnant with triplets.  The first two survive; the third one is stillborn.  Since they were expecting three, they follow fate in a way and adopt the only other baby in the hospital nursery--a black baby (back before the term African American) who'd been left at a fire station by his biological father on the day of his birth.

So the series involves the relationships between siblings, one of whom is a brilliant business man (nobody can understand exactly what he does but it has to do with commodities), one of whom is a struggling actor, one of whom struggles daily with obesity.  "It's what my life is about," she says, "What it's always been about."

We follow the parents and the children (later grandparents, children and grandchildren) through the paths of what each wants and doesn't want and we see the seeds of their desires as they unfold.  It's poignant, well-woven, and a must-see series.  If you don't want to subscribe to Hulu, I believe you can see it on the series' website.

Or maybe--unlike me--you have cable TV and have been watching it a week at a time long before I heard of it and discovered it's an excellent binge-watch.