This Is Us Season 5

This Is Us is down to its final batch of episodes — or to put that in terms that fans can understand, the final few tissues in the box. The sixth and final season of the NBC series that revitalized the family drama will begin to dole out its last 18 episodes on Jan. 4 at 9 p.m. The season 5 finale dropped a few shockers in two different time periods — Madison walked away from Kevin on their wedding day! Kate and Toby will get divorced and she'll marry Phillip ! Randall (Sterling K. Brown) will become a rising star in some fashion! — and these news flashes will get full stories in the coming months.

A certain deathbed scene with the family's matriarch, Rebecca , in the distant future. After building to a season finale centered around Kevin's wedding to Madison, the current timeline ends with Madison calling off the wedding after forcing Kevin to confront the fact that he is in love with the family they've created, but not with her. In the previous episode, Kevin overcame his doubts about Madison by heeding stepfather Miguel's advice that not every love story is an epic Hollywood tale. "Some love stories are written in the stars and other love stories are written together," he told the groom-to-be, comparing his marriage to Rebecca after the death of Jack to Kevin and Madison being brought together by her unexpected pregnancy. But Madison tells Kevin that she deserves to be marrying a man who is in love with her, and not just as the mother to his children.

Two or maybe even three of the specifics you asked are in the second episode. But a lot of the other stuff people are going to have to be patient for. The good news is, it's not going to take more than one season of television to get all the answers. My hope is that by the end of the series, there is no stone left unturned. You would have nothing left to ask me about spoilers. But by the end of it, I don't think there will be any of these timeline mysteries left.

Hopefully it will set us up for a very beautiful and simple ending to the entire venture. We're definitely all going to take a long nap after this last season. But I think definitely those two periods are periods we're going to spend more time in.

Obviously one was just established, but the other one has been used more for answers to questions, but we haven't lived there a lot. We'll be doing more of that in this upcoming season, which is always the plan, as opposed to having maybe three or four past story lines in one episode, we could wind up with episodes that have two or three or four future and present story lines. The final scene of Tuesday's season finale jumped four years ahead to show Kate — gasp! Ever since the shocking time-jump finale of season three, a seed had been planted that Kate and Toby might split up in the future. That sad outcome for one of the couples at the heart of the show was confirmed in the final, time-jumping scene, as Kate is shown readying to marry a man that viewers barely know, her new boss Phillip . We're coming off an ending of the previous season that had a bunch of big moves for our characters.

You saw Kevin essentially get left at the altar. You saw that five years in the future, Kate is marrying somebody who's not Toby and who is a co-worker of hers. We've seen that Kate and Toby are going to be trying a version of a longer-distance marriage for a moment in time. We have seen Rebecca worrying about where her health is going next.

That first episode is really about marking where these characters are now, versus where they were five years ago. It's hard to believe that we're so close to the end of the smash-hit NBC drama starring Mandy Moore, Milo Ventimiglia, Sterling K. Brown, Chrissy Metz and Justin Hartley. In just 18 episodes, we'll all learn what's really going on in that famous flash-forward scene and what the future holds for the Big Three. In the season 5 finale, we got a better idea of what's in store next when we saw Kevin involved in a construction company called "Big Three Construction," Randall being featured in a magazine as a "rising star," and Kate getting married to another man. "My hope is that by the end of the series, there is no stone left unturned," he told EW. In her bones, Madison always knew Kevin wasn't in love with her.

Primarily, he said the final season will "live heavily" in the time period of Kate's second wedding, when the Big Three are 45, and in the period 10 to 15 years down the line, when the family has gathered by Rebecca's bedside. Season 5 of this series is a total waste of time. The cliff-hanger in the last minutes of the final episode is lame beyond description.

I should have gone with my gut and quit after season 4. The first 3 seasons were solid, but from 4 onwards the quality of the writing just decreased. They traded believable characters and well thought out story lines for cringe worthy artificial drama. I remember Chris Geere came in to meet Chrissy and do a little reading with her very, very early in our season.

We had to go through intensive testing protocols, and it was a whole deal. But I want it to feel them together, even though I've been such a fan of his for such a long time; that's how we do it on this show. He was just reading a version of an early scene with his character , and I remember telling him where this was going to give him the context. And I remember him just nodding and trying to process it, probably keep on a bit of a cool face, being somebody who watched the show, which he does. He was like, "Oh, s---! I'm walking into it right now." And you know, Sully and Chrissy Metz have always been like the rest of the cast.

They never complain or try to force me out of a story point. Even though it's hard when you're always reading stuff on the internet. And you know you just want to give people sugar all the time — just give everybody what they want all the time. Our fourth episode up is one of those specialized, very different episodes. And it's as good as Milo Ventimiglia has ever been in the show.

It's a Jack episode, and it's really, really good. By the end of the season, this show, before getting really simple, it gets really ambitious. To me, it may be [Ventimiglia's] best episode of the entire series.

It was a bit of a love letter by the writer of the episode — and the writers — to give Jack one here in the final season, and Milo really delivered. As a reminder, he's a pretty public city councilman in Philadelphia as we left him last season, and we know that five years from now he's getting a bit of national press that's anointed him as somebody with potential. The journey to get from here to there is a long one. It can't just happen in the first episodes of the season; it's going to require some things to be built and some events to happen that propel him.

But it's a fun journey to watch him go on with his family in the midst of the crisis of his mother's failing health. And other things that may be happening to the family. This man who's constantly in an existential crisis, trying to live up to the model of the man that his father was and always feeling like he's failing. We find Kevin fresh off the heels of this wedding fiasco with Madison, trying to figure out how you co-parent and have what he considers a normal family while not being with the mother of your children. That is demanding a lot of his focus and a lot of his existential crisis.

On a career level, he's at a place right now as we left him last season, he's not the hottest he's ever been. He's developing a reputation for walking off sets. So that works in concert with him also trying to figure out how he's going to provide some normalcy for his family.

We're spanning a lot of time by the time we get to the end of this. My hope for the show has always been that the end of the show, for those who have stuck with it and those who the show has been important to, will feel like a complete meal. You don't always love all the decisions a character might make, but we're hoping that because we tried to plan this out so far in advance that you will have felt like you've closed the final page on one of those sprawling family novels that we all enjoy.

In covering that much time —we've used the reference in the past, people come and go from the painting — not all of that is baked in severe trauma and tragedy. Sometimes it just comes with the passing of time. Sometimes stuff happens that takes people before their time.

It's one we've been planning for quite a while to start our sixth season. When people see it, they'll feel that it was baked into the fabric of the show a little bit. It's a pretty simple parenting story, which is where we often lived at our best and most simplest with Jack and Rebecca — just two parents navigating new experiences with young children. It's something that hopefully will be relatable, particularly to people who grew up in that era, or parents who were parenting back at that time. Thematically, they're going to start dealing with kids exploring heavy subject matter for the first time in their lives.

As mentioned, Rebecca started to repair her relationship with Randall in the season 5 finale. The Pearson matriarch also told the Big Three she wasn't sure how much time she had left. But before she dies, she hopes to spend her life with the ones she loves.

The final season will have a total of 18 episodes. During the premiere, the cast teased there would be another trilogy of episodes that focuses on the Big Three as well as a Jack-centric episode about his mother's death. Over the past few seasons, we've slowly been fed clues to the Pearson family's future, but there are still several questions that need answering in the remaining episodes. Why was Nicky, not Miguel, at Rebecca's bedside?

Why haven't we seen Kate in the big flash-forward yet? We just know that there is so much more drama left to come. With fewer than 20 episodes of the show remaining before it ends for good after This Is Us Season 6, fans are desperate to learn the fates of their favorite characters. Team woman&home has answered all your burning questions about the recent finale, so buckle up as we recap the end of Season 5. Fogelman expressed in multiple interviews that all timelines of the characters would come to completion, and fans wouldn't be left with questions by the end of the series finale.

Switching back to the present timeline in the episode, Madison called off her wedding with Kevin. There were hints in the two-minute flash-forward that Kevin and Madison could be writing their love story together. In the episodes leading up to the finale, Kevin came to the realization that he changes aspects about himself in order to please the woman he is dating. That continues to be true at his wedding, when the actor runs himself ragged trying to give Madison the perfect day and edits movie references out of his vows, per her request. The fifth-season finale of the NBC family drama ended with a surprising reveal that has been in the plans for "quite a while," says Dan Fogelman.

"There will be no looming questions when we get though the end of next season. Everything will be resolved." As for what fans can expect from the hit show's final season, we already know from the season five finale that Kate will be splitting from her husband Toby and is set to eventually marry music executive Phillip , with season six seeing their romance unfold. We've talked about it ad nauseam, but there's always been a big-picture plan for the show. We feel very comfortable that we don't have to rush. The show at the outset of the season is going to be very much the show that people are familiar with. We're not picking up with Toby and Kate in complete marital crisis on the cusp of divorce.

We have the plan for how we're going to do it, and then how we're going to do the rest and what happens later in her timeline. But we're going to live with Toby and Kate for quite a while. They're not just all one thing most of the time. We're going to try to show that in all its colors. After Toby lost his job, it became clear that he didn't want to become a stay-at-home dad. Kate also started working at a music school, and she fell in love with it.

Then in the finale, Toby received an opportunity to work for a startup in San Francisco three days a week, and Kate tried to resign from her position. But Kate's co-worker, Phillip , reminded her how good she was at her job. So Kate and Toby settled on a bicoastal relationship for half the week. List of episodesThe fifth season of the American television series This Is Us continues to follow the lives and connections of the Pearson family across several time periods.

Productions, Zaftig Films, and 20th Television, with Dan Fogelman, Isaac Aptaker, and Elizabeth Berger serving as showrunners. Breaking away from the show's usual fall release, the sixth and final season premieres on Jan. 4, 2022, on NBC. Additionally, the final season will air uninterrupted as there will be no midseason break. In the time jump, Randall is shown being profiled by a magazine as a "Rising Star," uncle Nicky references a "wife" and Beth is a bridesmaid for Kate, along with Madison. When speaking about the new seeds that have been planted heading into the final season — which will capture the 41st year of life for the Big Three — Fogelman called out Brown and Moore in particular as other big storylines ahead. This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman has long known how the Pearson family's story will end.

And, in wrapping season five (which is the penultimate season for the top-rated NBC drama), Fogelman and his creative team revealed a new timeline for the show to explore when it returns for its final run. NBC has promised that the family drama's final season will have "a largely uninterrupted run" following season five's pandemic-induced delayed start, multiple hiatuses and shortened episode count. If you have a valid cable login, you can watch tonight'sThis Is Us season premiere live on the NBC websiteorNBC app. You can also streamThis Is Us Season 6 live with a premium subscription service, includingYouTube TV,Hulu + Live TV,fuboTV,Sling TV, and DIRECTV STREAM.

Naturally, the whole Pearson family will be back for the final season, including Milo Ventimiglia , Mandy Moore , Sterling K Brown , Chrissy Metz and Justin Hartley . As we know, Jack died in a tragic house fire many years ago, but that won't stop him playing a pivotal part in these last remaining episodes, by way of flashbacks. I mean, I haven't really talked to anybody about it, honestly. It's been interesting seeing the news of , just because we've been so clear about it from the very beginning that it was going to be six seasons. The Pearson family story has an endpoint because of the age of the kids, and because we're telling the story in the future.

It's not to say there aren't more surprises in store, but I just honestly haven't even had the conversations. Elsewhere in the hour, Randall (Sterling K. Brown) and Rebecca experienced healing in their conversation about his perspective-shifting trip to New Orleans to learn about his birth mother. Rebecca asked Kate to build that modern house next to the family cabin as seen in the flash-forward. Malik revealed to Deja that he got into Harvard, setting up another long-distance situation. Oh, and five years from now, Randall is a rising star getting national magazine attention. But a four-years-from-now sequence — which viewers were fooled into thinking was present-day Kevin working on his vows — served as a double twist.

As it turns out, Kevin wasn't just not getting married to Madison, he wasn't getting married at all. He was prepping his speech at the wedding of his sister, Kate , who was marrying her music teacher boss, Phillip . Shocked viewers had been played like a fiddle, as the episode showcased rising tension between Kate and husband Toby after he secured a job in another city. But instead of giving into division, they pledged their love to each other and vowed to make this long-distance relationship work. So I do think it's going to feel like that, closing a final chapter. I do think after a lot of ambition in the season, I think it will feel really simple.