This is Us: Dan Fogelman's comedy series is one of the best on television with its take on racial politics, mental trauma

It seems almost ridiculous, at first, that a network soap opera might be one of the best foreign TV shows. The scenes from the ‘80s and ‘90s are set in white American suburbia, and the series’ crux is best summed up as “family.” It’s sentimental to a fault — the music, by Marvel’s Runaways composer Siddhartha Khosla, certainly tugs on the heartstrings — but while its setting sounds run-of-the-mill, the end result is anything but. Given that Jack’s death was sudden and the family never fully recovered from it; the show is also about wrestling with how to keep memories and traditions alive, when they hold so much conflicting meaning. At first glance, This is Us may not strike you as the kind of show that would introduce an Igbo Nigerian supporting character who reads Nnedi Okorafor’s Afrofuturist Binti series as a mere background detail, but one third of the show’s writers room is Black. Of course, one can’t really talk about the show without addressing the elephant in the room: 2018 feature film Life Itself, an unmitigated disaster directed by This is Us creator Dan Fogelman.