This is us is an American television drama series about a family set in the present time. The mother of the family has a triplet pregnancy in 1980 and one of the babies is stillborn. The couple decides they want to have a third child in addition to their son and daughter. The white couple adopts a black infant boy whose biological has abandoned him the same day the triplets are born. The series follows what happens in the family decades afterwards when the children have their own families. The storytelling involves a lot of flashbacks.
I happened to watch one episode the other day. In that episode, the biological and adopted sons of the family try and mend their troubled relationship. The adopted son has always felt that he does not really belong in the family because he is so obviously different looking than the others. The biological son and the other family members have no clue as the what is going on. It seems that they do not understand the issues of trans-racial adoptees have. One of the issues separate from the race theme is the biological son's long-standing envy of the adopted son who becomes a successful finance professional. The boys fight a lot as kids and the biological son taunts his adopted brother a lot.
What impressed me was the quality of the writing. The scriptwriters obviously did a lot of research on the topic of trans-racial adoptions. The adopted son has been seeing a group of trans-racial adoptees as an adult. He is thus capable of articulating the issues with remarkable honesty and clarity. He tells his brother that, as is fairly common for such adoptees, he has had imaginary parents who look like him. In this case, he imagined as a child that the local weatherman and the local librarian who were both black were his real parents. The adopted son thinks he's the only one with such fantasies. His brother hears the full story from him for the first time as an adult. Even as a child he is conflicted because he loves his adopted family and is unsure as to whether he should have these thoughts.
Anyone with a lick of intelligence and imagination should be able to understand that the experience of having been adopted can be a complicated thing as can be being the parent or a sibling of an adopted child. For small children, the quality of the relationships with their parental figures is all that matters. But as adolescents and adults, questions of identity may become haunting for some if there is any lack of clarity in the matter.
This is us seems like the kind of series that papers over nothing. I think I'm going to watch it from the beginning and continue to watch it when I've caught up. The writing and acting are superb and I would say that all the critical acclaim the series had got is certainly not for nothing.
