Dan Fogelman had an ending for This Is Us proper from the start.

The sequence creator had lengthy deliberate for Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) to die in a fireplace and for Kate (Chrissy Metz) and Toby (Chris Sullivan) to undergo a divorce. What’s extra, he at all times knew that he’d break that viewers’s hearts by having the Pearsons say goodbye to Rebecca (Mandy Moore) within the penultimate episode.

“I knew that it could finish with the demise of the matriarch of the household, who in some ways the present was typically very a lot about,” he defined to Leisure Weekly, including that these plot factors aided in telling the Pearson’s story, “These particulars let you play in time confidently, as a result of you already know the place you are going linearly, even when you’re not telling the story linearly.”

And with a transparent story in thoughts, Fogelman was insistent that the present observe the course set all these years in the past.