‘This Is Us’ Showrunners Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger on ‘So Surreal’ Series End: ‘I Don’t Think It’s Really Hit Us’
19.01.2022 - 03:56
/ usmagazine.com
Not ready to say goodbye. The series finale of This Is Us is rapidly approaching, but showrunners Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger aren’t yet saying goodbye.
“It’s so surreal,” Aptaker exclusively told Us Weekly shortly after the season 6 premiere. “I look at my ID photo when I drive onto the Paramount lot every day, which was taken the first day of This Is Us, and it’s like it’s a different person.”
Last year, NBC announced that the Emmy-winning series’ sixth season would be its last, much to the disappointment of fans who’ve been following the Pearson family since the show premiered in September 2016.
“I don’t think it’s really hit us yet that it’s over,” Berger told Us. “And part of that is on purpose. I don’t think we can really process it until it is over.”
NBC hasn’t announced an air date for the series finale, which hasn’t yet been filmed. Aptaker and Berger noted that they haven’t had much time to take in the reality of the show’s end because there’s still “too much work to do” before the series wraps up.
“It’s been such a gigantic chapter of all of our lives,” Aptaker explained. “And I think it’s so bittersweet because it does feel like the right time to end the show.”
Berger, for her part, emphasized that working through the coronavirus pandemic brought the cast and crew even closer than they already were.
“There’s a lot of us, you know. We’ve gotten married, we’ve had children, we’ve gone through losses together,” she told Us. “It really, truly is a family, and it’s the kind of thing where you can’t really process that it’s gonna go away until it happens.”
Last year, Sterling K. Brown, who plays Randall Pearson, expressed similar feelings about the impending finale, telling Kelly Clarkson that he would definitely