This Is Us Is Really Going Off the Rails
Our favorite stars make a pretty penny by playing our equally favorite characters. Would their alter egos fair as well in the real world? Let's take a look at the real life salaries of eight TV characters. [SOUND] Coinage, Life, well spent, presented by Geico. When she's not dealing with all the drama at Grey Sloan Memorial, Meredith Grey is healing the citizens of Seattle as chief of surgery. According to payscale.com, this career pays an average annual salary of just over $300,000. Rick Grimes may not be making much fighting the undead in the zombie apocalypse but he may have done well when he was fighting crime as a Georgia sheriff. The average salary for an Atlanta deputy sheriff is a smidge under $47,000 a year. [MUSIC] Life in the big city probably gets pricey for Grace Adler. But we're sure that's she's making ends meet as an interior designer with her own company. The average annual salary for an interior designer in New York City falls slightly short of $61,000. Randall Pearson may be the biggest success story of the entire Pearson clan. His work as a weather derivatives trader would be just as promising in reality with an average salary of $92,000 a year. Now the Joyce Byers' son has finally fled the upside down of the Demogorgon. She can relax and get back to work as a retail clerk. This gig pays an annual salary of about $18,000 today, most likely less in the 1980s. Acting as bodyguard for a god may pay differently in TV land. But in real life, Shadow Moon would be working for mortals at an average of nearly $62,000 a year. Springfield may not sleep too soundly with Homer Simpson as their nuclear safety inspector. But actual workers in nuclear safety ditched their donuts for competency at an average of over $77,000 a year. Olivia Pope is the ultimate fixer in an extreme world of damage control. Outside the small screen, Crisis Managers deal with hopefully a whole lot less for an average annual salary of just over $61,000 a year. [MUSIC] Coinage, Life, well spent. Presented by GEICO.
The fourth installment of This Is Us’s current season, “Vietnam,” focuses on Jack’s time spent serving in the Vietnam War. And by “focuses” we mean, it is the episode. Like, all of it. So long, Randall’s identity crises, Kate’s fertility struggles, et al. — this week we headed to southeast Asia.
Us’s first two seasons mastered the Lost-esque art of the slow burn. We learned of Jack’s death in one of the series’s very first episodes, but it took us almost two years to pull together all the pieces in the network TV game of Clue it set up for us. Now that we know all the details (spoiler: it was the crock pot in the Pearson House circa 1998), Us’s writers have made a sharp pivot away from the Dead Jack storyline, opting for the breezier “Jack and Rebecca fall in love” and not-so-breezy “Jack fights in Vietnam” arcs.
This is not to say I’m not enjoying season three’s avoidance antics — oh, I am — rather, it just feels a little forced, as if the writers poured their every ounce of creativity into executing a dramatic death for the audience’s favorite character, but then realized they’d need him to stick around if they wanted to maintain their ratings (Milo Ventimiglia fans stan hard).
The current approach to the ghost of Jack Pearson’s past madness is through a new character, Jack’s brother Nicky (Michael Angarano). Keeping with the tragic slow burn aesthetic of Us, Nicky is dead — we’re told he died in Vietnam — but we’ve yet to see his demise play out on screen.
“Vietnam” plays all its emotional cards just right. We watch the heart-wrenching moment that Nicky is drafted, see Jack’s savior complex develop as he protects his little brother throughout the years, and even bear witness to Nicky’s birth — the nurse hits us over the head with how “lucky” he is to be born on Oct. 18 (the day that leads to his drafting and eventual death).
In another strange and emotionally manipulative turn, we meet one of Jack’s army friends, a man named Robinson (Mo McRae, who, awkwardly, also plays Deja’s father in the season premiere), who fantasizes about joining the New York Giants. Soon after the introduction, Robinson’s foot is blown off in combat. Ever the loyal friend, Jack stays by his side as he struggles through the pain. The next morning the two share an incredibly on-brand heart-to-heart in which Robinson holds Jack’s face in both his hands. The music swells and we see the same gesture repeated more than two decades later, this time with Jack holding a teenage Randall’s face in his hands.
The parallel is understood, but the fact that it’s reenacted with Randall and not, say, Kevin (who, like Robinson, had athletic aspirations that were thwarted due to injury), feels a little bizarre.
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Invested as we are in the series (very), Us’s tear-jerking tactics feel less and less organic — more the product of an NBC ratings computation than an attempt to create lasting and affecting art. The show needs to upgrade its machinery, fast, before our weekly sob-fest turns to mourning a series that was once a must-watch.
