'This Is Us' showrunner Isaac Aptaker talks redemption arcs in season 2, spin-off possibilities, and more

Dan Fogelman created This Is Us. The show that has you smiling and then in shambles. But apart from creating the show and taking the stars of the show to new heights of fame, Fogelman also nurtured good writers and gave showbiz new producers. Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger are two such individuals who do the double duty of writing and producing episodes, including the widely talked about one which finally reveals how Milo Ventimiglia’s patriarch Jack Pearson died. They also penned the finale of season one and other important episodes.

In this interview, Isaac Aptaker talks about the show's past, present, and future (including the possibilities of spin-offs). He gets into details of working different timelines and what makes it appealing to all.

Does Dan Fogelman delegate sort of the day-to-day running? Is he as involved as you guys?

Isaac: Yeah, he's very involved. Elizabeth and I have been working with Dan for about eight or nine years in some capacity, whether it's a movie or a different show. We all know each other very well and sort of have very similar tastes when it comes to writing in the show. So we divide up stuff. You know, he weighs in on everything, he reads every script, gives notes on every cut. So yeah, he's still very, very day to day involved in the show.

You have other seasons picked up already, did it change the dynamics in relation to the beginning of the show now that you can plan how stories will unfold?

Isaac: Yeah. What was so nice, it was so cool, is last year, NBC picked us up for season two and season three all at once. And, you know, the first season of the show, we didn't know whether we were doing 12 episodes or were we doing 24 episodes. We had no idea. But once we got told that we were doing 36 episodes spread out over two seasons, so we've really been able to plot it out so carefully and craft it almost like a novel where we know exactly where we want things to fall. Because we have our airing schedule for the next two years. It really helps.

And presumably, with this show, that's more essential than other shows because of the very complicated timeline structure.

Isaac: Yes, because we're jumping around so much, we have so many reveals, and so many parts of these characters' lives. Really being able to look ahead and decide when we want to parse out information and dive into different stories have been so, so helpful for us. Yeah.

How do you manage the stuff, all the family drama and the mystery?

Isaac: I think we believe, like, you only care about these mysteries if you really, really are in love with the characters is what we found. So, I mean, the cast makes it easy. They're all so incredible and so much fun to write for. But we come to it from a sort of a personal family place first. Pretty much every story starts with someone in the writers' room or one of their friends or family members, you know, a real experience that happened to them, and then we kind of build out from there. So we're never coming and going like, what's a big twist that we can add in? That sort of comes in more organically from these real grounded stories.

Because you're afraid of the mystery being the focus.

Isaac: Right, right. And to a certain extent, there's going to be some people, and that's fine, who are excited to find out. And we do, we definitely, we give clues, and that's part of the fun of the show. But hopefully, people are getting more from that, that people are seeing their own experience reflected back at them in one of these characters.

This show has been probably the most successful network show for some years. To what do you credit that to?

Isaac: If you look at the network, there hasn't been sort of a quality family drama on for a while. And also, like, our country is in a bit of turmoil right now. I think there's a lot of bad news, there's a lot of division. Even within families, there's a lot of division. And people, you know, being able to come home after work and turn on something on that reaffirms that even though we're flawed and we struggle, like humanity at its core is good and people are trying to do their best. I think that's a really, a nice thing to be able to come home and watch on TV. And also, I mean, we never intended to, like, be the cry show. It just sort of happened. But if you follow on Twitter, I think people need, they like this cathartic kind of emotional release. So if we're providing that for them, then great.

Is there a point where it's not going to be too much? If someone is not watching for three weeks, how can you drag them back in with so much stuff happening?

Isaac: The show is very serialized. It's the kind of thing where if you miss a couple weeks. I mean, we do these previously on things where we try to pack in a week, two weeks' of content into 20 seconds. But yeah, it's something—I mean, we found that our fans are pretty loyal and tend to watch every week because it is so, you do fall behind so quickly. But yeah, it is the kind of thing that it definitely rewards people who watch closely.

You mentioned there hasn't been a quality family drama like this for a while, what is the thing you aspire to, the work you aspire to?

Isaac: I think, in terms of worldview, at least—I mean, I’ll only speak for myself, but those guys I think are great. We do believe that people are inherently good. There's an optimism to sort of the stuff that we want to put out into the world. And so much of what's on TV right now is a little bit bleak. You know, they're wonderful shows. We love them and we watch them. But it's like, your Walking Deads and your Breaking Bads, which I'm obsessed with, are great shows, but they don't necessarily leave you feeling like, ah, people are great deep down. They’re a little bit darker. So we want to sort of put something out there that's a little bit counter that.

Like Walking Dead, did you ever think that in a show about real life, there can be so many twists and how many twists? How to control that?

Isaac: Right. What I think is so interesting about a lot of what people call our twists is it’s we're revealing things that our characters already know. We're just telling the audience. Whereas on a show like Lost, the characters are discovering something new that none of them, they didn't know there was a smoke monster on the island. But all we're doing is saying, 'Jack is dead.' This family has known Jack is dead for two decades now. But we're just telling you for the first time. So I think, yeah, if you think—we're shooting our 29th episode now. We've only spent 29 hours with this family. This is a family that's existed for, you know, with these kids, 37 years, and going back before them, even longer than that. So there's lots and lots of pieces to what becomes the story of a family. So I think there's a lot more.

How do you make sure that most of the big characters have screen time in one of these episodes?

Isaac: It becomes the kind of thing where people don't necessarily—every character doesn't necessarily appear in every episode. We have our core characters who do. But some weeks, you know, this year we're doing William’s story, and some weeks we're doing a different character. We can't always serve everyone every week because we only have 42 minutes.

Who are the core? The five of them?

Isaac: Yeah, the three siblings, Mandy, and Milo are kind of our core. And then, of course, their significant others, Toby and Beth. And then William, we love and we try to have him as much as possible. But he also is dead in our current timeline, so we're a little bit more limited with what we can do.

When does the spinoff start? Next season? And who would that be with?

Isaac: Well, I don't think we're ready to spin anyone off yet. We still have stories to tell with the characters on the show. But down the line, that's interesting. I'm sure that's something we'll talk about. Our minds are exploding just trying to do 18 episodes a year of this one show, the idea of trying to start another just now, we'd all die.

Was it quite a validation to have so many Emmy nominations in a year that?

Isaac: I think that we connected with people was the most important thing to us, that we found an audience, which is so hard to do now. But yeah, of course. The fact that we were also acknowledged by our community was so cool.

Were you expecting that?

Isaac: No. I don't think you’re ever expecting it. You're always kind of like fingers crossed, like people really seem to be connecting with it and getting what we're trying to do, but you're never—I mean, we were all jumping up and down that day. We had a big champagne toast with the entire cast and crew. Yeah, we were thrilled.

Do you feel that it changed something, the creation aspect, the fact that you received all those awards and nominations?

Isaac: No. I mean, we do our best. There was so much buzz about the show that the first year, and, you know, with awards stuff, and in the media, and also with fans, because we can all read what fans think on Twitter ten seconds after they see it. We're really trying to do our best to keep our heads down and write the show that we always wanted it to be. Because it's so easy to get distracted with, oh, this person didn't like that story, and this person doesn't like that character. And if you let too many of those voices in, you lose track of what you set out to do. So yeah, of course, we see some of it, and we're human, it's inevitable, we're curious. But we try, as much as possible, to block it out and kind of focus on the work.

Is that something that surprised you, that your reveal of Jack's death exploded on the social network? Did it make you want to back down?

Isaac: The death of Jack, I don't think we were surprised that people obviously were very, very curious. But because Milo does such an amazing job playing that character, I think the level that people fell in love with him and the amount sort of thus—like, because of his performance, the amount of attention and obsession on how he died and when he died, that, I think, overwhelmed sort of what we were expecting a little bit, to the point where we realised this season. Part of why it was so important to us to sort of answer a big piece of that question, which we do at the start of this season, was because we realised, like, people love this guy. At a certain point, it's not fun for them to wonder how he died because they love Milo's portrayal so much. So we wanted to put a little bit of that to bed and say, here's some information. Now you can enjoy the time you have with him until you see the death.

This season so far seems to be sort of exploring the darker side of these characters, especially Milo's character. The alcoholism, his criminal past, and with the adopted kid's abuse. Was that a deliberate decision that you wanted to kind of go a bit deeper into those grittier elements?

Isaac: Yeah. For Jack, especially, yeah, with the past, too. Season one was so much about building up the idea and the mythology of this perfect dad, this superhero, this larger than life figure. But that's not necessarily—no one is all good. And so, like Milo always says, season one you spend 18 hours with this guy and you think you know him, and season two is a little bit about deconstructing that man that you thought you knew and realising that he's an amazing guy, he's an amazing dad, he's an amazing husband. But he's also a person, and he had a life before a family, and he has demons and flaws. So season two is really about peeling back the layers and realising that he's not a superhero, he's a human, and there's some darker stuff to him.

Is your aim to go dark but then to be redemptive in some way?

Isaac: Yeah, I think the aim of the show is to kind of capture all of the colours of life. So, in times, as we all know, life can be very dark. But it's our hope and our belief that people do find ways to redeem themselves, and there are those little silver linings to every dark moment if you look hard enough. So yeah, I mean, there are definitely—we're very, very mindful not to go too dark because I think people do look to the show for the sort of hope and to feel good. But yeah, there are parts of the season that definitely go a bit darker and heavier than they necessarily did last year.

Because you're dealing with alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, adoption of even older kids. When you're dealing with those subjects, do you have in mind that you want to portray them in a way that maybe not, you know, exposed to those—or think, you know, a drug addict is a weak person or something like that. Do you think about that when writing for the characters?

Isaac: Yes, definitely. We're also, especially when it comes to addiction and sort of our more issue-driven plots, we try to get it really right. You know, we have our ten writers who have a lot of experience and their own stories to draw on. But we also have experts come in. So with our addiction story, we have an expert come in and talk to us about what does AA look like. We have, for our stuff with transracial adoption with Randall in season one, we had black people who were raised by white parents come in and tell us, and also white parents who had raised black children, come in and tell us about their stories. We're always just trying to draw from a really personal experience place. So when we don't have that experience amongst our ten writers, and how could we all the time, we always bring people in. They have to sign those contracts that say they won't spoil anything, and then they just talk to us for two hours and usually wind up crying. And we always get something great out of it. 

Worst case scenario, if the network pulls the plug on This Is Us, with the timelines all mixed up, do you have the last piece already mapped out? So viewers know how it's going to end.

Isaac: Yeah, we do know how we want it to end, and also, in terms of the network, they're so—and Jen Salke, really, who is the president of NBC here—they're so connected to the show, and the back and forth is there's such good communication that I think, like, for now, obviously, I don't think it's in the near future. But when the show sort of does start to wind down, I think that will be a decision that we all make together, so we can really do the end the way we want to do the end. I really hope and believe this won't be the kind of show where it's just like, wait, that was the last episode? They don't get to finish. I think that.

This Is Us airs every Saturday on Star World and Star World HD at 9.00pm.