The This Is Us powers-that-be are messing with us again. Just when fans of the hit NBC drama think they will get a big piece of the puzzle regarding Jack’s death on the Season 2 premiere, an executive producer drops a teaser hint that the death storyline will drag out at least until February.
In an interview posted by Campaign Live , This is Us EP Ken Olin revealed that Milo Ventimiglia’s character’s cause of death is still top secret, but that it could have something to do with the biggest game of the year. When asked to shed some light on Jack’s death and when viewers will find out how he died, Olin dropped this hint:
“Oh, wouldn’t you like to know! I can’t tell you that, unfortunately. But there is a good reason why we will be on after the Super Bowl.”
This Is Us fans know that football is a big part of the Pearson family’s life. Jack and Rebecca (Ventimiglia, Mandy Moore) were huge Pittsburgh Steelers superfans and they conceived their triplets on the night of Super Bowl 1980. In the present day, their daughter Kate Pearson (Chrissy Metz) has a ritual of watching the Steelers with her late father’s urn of ashes by her side.
But Olin’s hint has fans wondering if Jack’s death could have occurred on the same day as a Super Bowl game in the late 1990s. Fun (or maybe not-so-fun) fact: The Pittsburgh Steelers played in the 1996 Super Bowl, losing to the Dallas Cowboys at Arizona’s Sun Devil Stadium. This Is Us fans know that Jack died in the mid to late 1990s when his three kids were teenagers.
Another scenario could be that the Feb. 4, 2018, episode of This Is Us will be set in the present day on Super Bowl 2018 and that is what Olin is referring to. Anything — and any era — is possible with This Is Us .
One thing is for certain: The post-Super Bowl episode of This Is Us will not be a standalone episode. NBC chairman Robert Greenblatt previously told TV Line that the Feb. 4 episode will be the next episode of the show and not just a “very special episode” to draw in new viewers. Still, Greenblatt cautioned that tissues may need to be on hand alongside the taco dip.
“It’s going to be an extraordinary and… [very] emotional episode of television,” the NBC executive said of the This Is Us Super Bowl time slot.
“It’s not a standalone episode. It’s going to be the next episode of the show. But there will be a lot of new fans who have never seen it before, and they’ll have no trouble dropping in. [Series creator] Dan [Fogelman] wants it to be very easy for someone [new] to come into it rather than have them go, ‘ What is going on here?’ At the same time, I think he really wants to pay off things for the [existing] fans.”
Check out a trailer for This Is Us Season 2 below.
This is Us returns to NBC on September 26 at 9 p.m. ET.
[Featured Image by Ron Batzdorff/NBC]
