This Is Us series finale: Why certain scenes were shot years in advance

One of the things that is most intriguing about the This Is Us series finale is that there are actually some parts of it rooted far in the past. To be specific, four years in the past. The show technically started work on its series finale pretty early on in its run!

We’ll go ahead and admit here that this is not the first time that we’ve heard of this. Over the years, we have heard the occasional rumbling that there was some footage banked for Tuesday’s big episode. Yet, we didn’t quite realize how extensive some of the process was, or precisely why it was done at a specific point in time.

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In a new report from Entertainment Weekly, it is revealed that a big reason for this was to capture footage of some adult characters with the younger actors at a very specific moment in time — because kids age so quickly, it can be hard to recapture things so many years later.

Creator Dan Fogelman also noted in the same piece that several cast members worked additional days years ago to ensure that they would have this footage available, no matter what:

“I was like, ‘Guys, we’re gonna spend an extra four days on set and you’re gonna shoot material with the kids that won’t air for years and is untethered to anything else you’re doing.’ And they were like, ‘Great!'”

For years now, Fogelman has said that the plan was for the This Is Us series finale to come at the end of season 6. There was always a chance that things could have changed over time but in the end, they didn’t and this does absolutely feel like the right time to end the show. You want people to still miss you when you’re gone, and not sit around and feel like you’ve overstayed your welcome to a certain degree.

How do you think the series finale for This Is Us is going to end?

Be sure to let us know right away in the attached comments! Once you do just that, be sure to keep coming back — there are other updates that we don’t want you to miss.

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