'This Is Us' Won't Be Back For A While, So You Can Stop Crying On Tuesdays
On Nov. 28, fans will watch the fall finale of NBC's smash hit This Is Us, with the third and final installment of its three part arc, each of which focused on one of the "Big Three." All three episodes cover the exact same time period for the Pearson triplets, with this final installment including a flashback to Christmas 1990, and perhaps more clues towards how Jack died. But with so many questions left unanswered from these life-changing episodes, fans are frantically wondering when will This Is Us come back? Yes, we can finally stash the tissue boxes for a few weeks, but soon enough we'll need our cathartic emotional fix once again.
UPDATE: On Dec. 12, NBC announced it will push back the midseason premiere of This Is Us until Jan. 9. No reason was given for the delay.
EARLIER: Don't worry my fellow Tuesday Night Cry Club, it won't be that long to wait. Though it seems that the theorized Christmas special never came to fruition, NBC is bringing back This Is Us in a big hurry once we get through the holidays. You'll barely have time to get rid of that New Year's Day hangover, and get re-hydrated. The show returns Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018, in the usual 9 p.m. one hour drama slot. Tissues at the ready!
This follows the same successful schedule that the first season plotted out. Last year, the show, which is 18 episodes long, aired the first ten installments, ending just after Thanksgiving, and then returning in January for the final eight episodes. This year is doing the same.
What can we expect when those final back eight episodes arrive? Probably more lead up to the reveal of how Jack perished. Some think we'll get that reveal in the fall finale. But since Kevin and Kate's flashbacks in their episodes all ended with Kevin's leg break, we assume that Randall's hour will also end there as well, though perhaps with one more clue thrown in to keep us wondering over the holidays.
What we are wondering about is what happens after the first five of those episodes air in January. The week after that is the Superbowl, on Feb. 4. This year, it's NBC's turn to air it. Like the other broadcast networks, they're using the event to push their most popular series, which in this case is This Is Us.
Talking about the episode, NBC's Robert Greenblatt said it will not be a standalone hour out of sequence with the rest of the series. (Some thought it might be a Steelers or Superbowl-themed episode, since football is important to Pearson patriarch Jack.)
If anything, it sounds like it will be the episode that would normally air on Tuesday.
It’s going to be an extraordinary and… [very] emotional episode of television. It’s not a standalone episode. It’s going to be the next episode of the show. But there will be a lot of new fans who have never seen it before, and they’ll have no trouble dropping in. [Show creator] Dan [Fogelman] wants it to be very easy for someone to come into it rather than have them go, “What is going on here?” At the same time, I think he really wants to pay off things for the [existing] fans.
Since the Superbowl episode is not a stand alone, but part of the story line, one assumes that it will then rerun Feb. 6, to catch the non-football fans of the show. That means the second half of the season will run through to the end of the month, and by March, we should know how Jack Pearson perished, before we put away the tissues until Season 3.
