5 Gospel Principles ‘This Is Us’ Taught Beautifully Over the Last Six Seasons

The following is excerpted from LDS Living. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.

At some point in the first few seasons of the hit television show This Is Us, some friends and I started what we called “Team Tuesday.” We’d go for a hike and then settle in to watch that week’s new episode together. I’ve now moved out of state but every Tuesday, three of us still text each other our reactions throughout the episode.

My parents across the country have cherished the show as an opportunity to have something to look forward to with my 16-year-old little sister when very little else seems to give them the chance to bond together.

So, tonight, we will all say goodbye to a dear friend as This Is Us concludes. The show is admittedly not completely clean, but it is arguably one of the cleanest dramas to hit our screens in a long time, and it is full of things that other network TV shows lack: heart and positive values. In fact, the entire premise of the show is based on principles that we as Latter-day Saints believe completely.

The Family Is Central to the Creator’s Plan

Monologues are a huge part of This Is Us, and perhaps the first monologue of the series came when one of the main characters, Kevin Pearson, an actor, confides in his nieces that when he reads a new script, he paints the way the script makes him feel. He then says:

“I painted this because I felt like the play was about life, you know? And life is full of color. And we each get to come along and we add our own color to the painting, you know? And even though it’s not very big, the painting, you sort of have to figure that it goes on forever, you know, every direction. So, like, to infinity, you know?

“’Cause that’s kind of like life, right? And it’s really crazy if you think about it, isn’t it? That a hundred years ago, some guy that I never met came to this country with a suitcase. He has a son, who has a son, who has me. So, at first, when I was painting, I was thinking, you know, maybe up here, that was that guy’s part of the painting and then, you know, down here, that’s my part of the painting. And then I started to think, well, what if we’re all in the painting, everywhere?

“And what if we’re in the painting before we’re born? What if we’re in it after we die? And these colors that we keep adding, what if they just keep getting added on top of one another, until eventually we’re not even different colors anymore? We’re just one thing. One painting. I mean, my dad is not with us anymore. He’s not alive but he’s with us. He’s with me every day. It all just sort of fits somehow.

“And even if you don’t understand how yet, people will die in our lives—people that we love—in the future, maybe tomorrow, maybe years from now. I mean it’s kind of beautiful right? If you think about it the fact that just because someone dies, just because you can’t see them or talk to them anymore, it doesn’t mean they’re not still in the painting. I think maybe that’s the point of the whole thing. There’s no dying. There’s no you or me or them. It’s just us.”

To read the full article, CLICK HERE.