The end is near. This Is Us only has one last episode for fans, and the series finale has been in the works for a long time.
Creator Dan Fogelman revealed that many scenes for the This Is Us series finale were filmed several years before they wrapped in May. “We’d shot a lot of it four years ago, and then we shot the rest of it in the last couple of weeks. I’m really proud of it,” he explained on Monday, May 16, during a Q&A session in Los Angeles via Deadline.
He noted that while cast members, including Mandy Moore and Milo Ventimiglia, who play the late Rebecca and Jack, respectively, filmed many scenes during the early seasons, he’d simply kept them in an edit bin, never watching the footage until it was time to edit the last episode of This Is Us.
Fogelman explained, “I was too anxious to look at it.”
The penultimate episode of the NBC drama, which aired on Tuesday, May 17, showed Rebecca’s death, and it also answered questions viewers had about Kate’s (Chrissy Metz) whereabouts (a London business trip) and Deja’s (La Trice Harper) pregnancy (Malik is the father). The final episode doesn’t have many loose ends to tie up, and that was very intentional, Fogelman revealed.
“So much attention that was put on ‘How does Jack die?’ early on. How Jack dies and the big episode where, in fact, he does die. But so much of our series is about what happens after,” Fogelman told Variety in an interview published Tuesday. “I always wanted and always had planned for the final episode of the series to revolve around the epilogue of the continuing story of the family rather than the moment.”
While the second-to-last episode of This Is Us pulled at heartstrings with the passing of the family matriarch, the series finale will be about the Pearsons working through the loss.
“I always thought that the second to last episode would end with Rebecca’s death, as we did, and that the final episode would try and capture something simple, that while sad, is kind of just a day in the life, which is so much of what the show is about, but it [is set] against Rebecca’s funeral,” the executive producer explained during Deadline‘s live event on Monday.
The This Is Us series finale airs on NBC Tuesday, May 24, at 9 p.m. ET. Scroll down to learn more about what the cast and writers have teased about the series finale:
