History YMMV / ThisIsUs

** Kate and Toby's relationship zigzags this. Is Toby an emotionally manipulative borderline stalker who doesn't respect Kate's boundaries, or is Kate an unstable bitch who pushes away her terrific boyfriend who loves her unconditionally? [[TakeAThirdOption Could be a little bit of both]].

** There were some complaints that Randall's children were largely written out of the sixth season just as they were starting to get older and have more interesting plots on their own, particularly Déja and Tess. The writers have confirmed that they were largely victims of the awkward TimeSkip – all three were teens or tweens before it happened, and all three had their future selves established, and it was just too awkward to try to cast actresses for those in-between years – even if Lyric Ross could possibly believably play 21-23 in the years of Kate's wedding or Miguel's funeral, Faithe Herman almost definitely couldn't play 16-18. Unfortunately, as a result, we don't get to see any more of their development or learn much about them just as they're starting to navigate the world on their own – there's no continuation of the arc of Tess exploring her sexuality or what drove her into social work, we don't know how Déja's relationship with Shauna healed (if at all) or why she went into medicine, and Annie, who is mostly a StaticCharacter due to her relatively young age, doesn't really ever get to be a character with much autonomy despite being there from episode one.

** Beth's repeated misgendering of Tess' partner Alex is apparently supposed to be accidental as she struggles to grasp the concept of non-binary genders, but it happens ''so'' often (and with dialogue implying that she's been persistently doing it for ''months'') that it honestly comes off as deliberate.

* AuthorsSavingThrow:
** After lots of griping about how the actress for teenage Kate is clearly not overweight, it's eventually revealed that during this period she actually had gotten to a healthy weight, but relapsed from it as she didn't feel any better like she was expecting. Explored further with the fact that [[spoiler: after Jack's death, she starts binge eating. In the first few months, she gains 25 pounds. The actress starts wearing padding during this period.]]
** After all the controversy over Toby not being played by a real overweight actor as noted below, they made sure to hire a genuinely blind actor to play [[spoiler:the adult Jack Damon]] in Season 4. The same season also features genuine stroke victim Timothy Omundson playing a character who’s disabled for the same reason, who was created specifically for him.
** Several sites including The AV Club have pointed out that throughout Season 3 and especially Season 4, the show is much more self-aware than it's given credit for and seems fully aware that the Pearsons are often selfish, short-sighted and very emotionally unhealthy. Taken to extremes in "After The Fire" when Randall imagines a schmaltzy, perfect future for himself if Jack had survived the fire – and his therapist rightly calls him out on what he's really projecting. He then imagines a nightmare, worst-case scenario, and the therapist still detects some extremely unhealthy coping mechanisms there. Three seasons ago, Randall would have been seen as TheWoobie, but the show has gradually shown that no character is completely straightforward or sympathetic.
** It's also defied the initial characterization that the show lionized Jack as the ultimate hero dad; the third and fourth seasons start to examine the ways in which the Big Three's idolization and perfect view of their dad has been extremely unhealthy for them, and how a lot of the advice he gave them during formative years actually developed them into adults with terrible coping mechanisms.
** Immediately after the reveal of [[spoiler:Laurel's survival]] in the Season 5 premiere, Dan Fogelman openly announced the very next day that further details about the twist would ''not'' be dragged out for years like Jack's death and the identity of "her" (not least because the show now had a definite endpoint to be working towards). He also stated in no uncertain terms that this was the very ''last'' time the show would do such a twist, nipping any jokes about [[spoiler:"Whoops, turns out Jack survived the fire"]] in the bud.
** A bit later, the season went even further in this direction, as after a winter cliffhanger that [[spoiler:Kate got pregnant as a teenager]], the ''very first line'' after it came back from hiatus casually reveals that [[spoiler:she got an abortion]].
** After many questioned how Beth had managed to get her dance studio up and running seemingly to a point of profitability within one season, and that her and Randall's relative lack of stress about money during the fourth season was unrealistic, Beth's livelihood was among the hardest hit by COVID. By the fifth season, it's a major problem for the family.
** The story of Tess' coming out had gotten some grumblings for years that Randall and Beth don't actually seem to be handling it nearly as well as the show wants us to think. Season 5 has Tess finally call Beth out for it, and acknowledges that while she's clearly making a good effort, refuses to let her off the hook for how it shouldn't take that much work to have the same attachment with Tess as her other daughters.
** Season 5 finally acknowledges how Kevin has built up a reputation for walking out on his commitments, no matter how justified each one was.
** Even though the reveal of Laurel, Randall's birth mother, surviving her OD was still considered one of the biggest AssPull moves the show has ever pulled, the episode "Birth Mother" which reveals her story was one of the most well-reviewed episodes of Season 5, and Randall's moment of closure with his mother's ghost was considered a satisfying conclusion to what could have been an otherwise awful plot.
** Two of the things the show has been criticized for occasionally by activists – adoption and weight – were addressed in more nuanced ways in the fifth and sixth season respectively.
*** For adoption, particularly transracial adoption, the show finally touches on the fact that not all adoptees feel immense gratitude toward their adoptive families, even those who love their adoptive families deeply. Randall's experience and telling Kevin that no one ever considered that he didn't get a choice in being adopted, as well as the stories of the other adoptees in his support group, show that it's much more complicated than simply telling someone to be grateful for being "chosen." The group also highlights the reality that transracial adoptees often lose their language, their cultures and practices, and other connections to who they are when they're adopted – and how processing these emotions can hurt their relationships with their adoptive families.
*** For weight, one of the biggest criticisms of Kate's character is that she is seemingly always defined by her weight and that there are so many plots about her trying to lose weight. As the series goes on, we not only see that her weight gain in her twenties was largely a trauma response – losing Jack and dealing with her relationship with Mark – but also see her confront the fact that shaming herself away from food didn't do her any good. She and Toby develop different views about weight – Toby wants his children to avoid gaining weight because he doesn't want them to be bullied for it, but Kate fears that if her children grow up with sugar and "bad" foods being taboo they won't have healthy relationships with food. The episode with this argument also shows how Kate, Rebecca ''and'' her mother all dealt with food shame at some point in their lives – and the future scenes show that Jack Damon and Hailey are both in relatively good shape, demonstrating that just because Kate let them eat sweets doesn't mean they grew up chubby.

* GeniusBonus: The painting that Rebecca is so fascinated by in "New York, New York, New York" (John Singer Sargent's ''Madame X'') was made in the 19th century and was quite controversial at the time for being such an "explicit" depiction of the female form, despite seeming completely tame now [[labelnote:*]]and in fact had to be censored after too many complaints; originally one of the straps on her dress was hanging off her shoulder, but Sargent covered it and moved the strap to its proper place. The painted-over line can be seen in properly-positioned lighting[[/labelnote]]. Thus, it fits perfectly with Rebecca's life story stuck as an old-fashioned housewife despite her dreams of something bigger, due to the time she lived in.

* CriticalResearchFailure:
** In the Season 5 finale, Jack spoils the victims of the notorious Moldavian wedding massacre from ''Series/Dynasty1981'' for Rebecca. Trouble is, the season finale with the massacre notoriously didn't actually reveal who was killed, and fans had to wait for the next season.
** One almost can't blame the show for missing this, but as much as the show has a keen memory of Pittsburgh history in the 80s and 90s, they missed one key thing in season 6: some Pittsburgh natives who were around at the time of the Challenger explosion confirmed that on that day, there was an historic blizzard in the area, and that schools were closed. The Big Three wouldn't have been able to watch the event at school.

* {{Anvilicious}}: Some fear the show is starting to veer in this direction as of season five, with its [[WereStillRelevantDammit repeated discussions of then-current events]] like the murder of George Floyd or the COVID-19 pandemic. The latter was especially problematic because the pandemic storyline was very inconsistent; characters would wear or forego masks seemingly randomly (likely because some scenes were filmed before the situation worsened enough for mandatory mask laws to become commonplace, but still), and many scenes of group activities and family get-togethers happened exactly how one would expect them to in a non-pandemic year, except for occasional lines of forced-sounding dialogue about isolating, getting vaccinated, and testing negative. The show wound up completely dropping the COVID subplot for the next season, which led to mixed reactions—some viewers thought it was the right move, and others thought that the transition from a COVID-filled world to a post-COVID world was too sharp and awkward.

** Phillip gets this to a mild degree, particularly from people who believed Kate and Toby is their OTP. Much of it also has to do with him being a FlatCharacter who didn't get any of the development people were expecting from the fifth season, with his role consisting of an extremely rushed romance followed by mostly just standing in the background of scenes with the actually developed Pearsons.

** Phillip gets this to a mild degree, particularly from people who believed Kate and Toby is their OTP. Much of it also has to do with him being a FlatCharacter who didn't get any of the development people were expecting from the fifth season.

*** This comes up a LOT in Season 6, as fans are very divided between siding with Kate and Toby when their marriage implodes, which is clearly what the writers were going for.