Picking up from yesterday –
And *instead of* it becoming a nice conversation about boundaries and such, it becomes a conversation about how her dad had died, and she used to watch football with him… And in the very next act, we see her and this guy watching football together with her dad’s urn.
What did we learn from this? She had a silly boundary and a man came in and was able to fix it – in one episode. We do not talk about his total lack of respect for her very clear wishes.
And it just felt problematic to me because this is the kind of thing we are fed over and over and over and over. “Woman doesn’t want to do something? Man swoops in and saves her. She should definitely do that thing with him.” And he’s painted as the hero for ‘breaking down a wall’ or whatever, not the villain for disrespecting her wishes.
And I will say that there’s some nuance to this (as there is everything in life), in the sense that earlier in the show, he actually had kind of pushed her a little, and it seemed helpful to her… The way it *appeared* to me (but of course, I could be wrong), is that with this other stuff, she *wanted* to do it, but was afraid… She *wanted* to go to the Hollywood party, but she didn’t feel very confident, so it was more of a “okay, well, then grab my hand and let’s go together.” Whereas, with this, she was very clear she wanted to watch football alone.
To me, it kind of goes back to this idea of there being two different types of nervous. And, while I respect the people making This Is Us… I really think, in this scenario, they showed us (and normalized) the wrong one.