“This Is Us” said goodbye to Mandy Moore’s Rebecca Pearson Tuesday — and so did many, many NBC viewers.
The second-to-last episode of the Dan Fogelman-created family drama drew a 0.95 rating in the advertiser-coveted adults 18-49 demographic and 5.3 million viewers, according to Live + Same Day ratings from Nielsen. That is the second-highest rated and second-most watched episode of the sixth and final season of “This Is Us.” The top episode in both categories was the Jan. 4 Season 6 premiere, which got a 1.05 and 5.5 million viewers.
The 9 p.m. “This Is Us” performance helped NBC top its English-language broadcast competition in primetime Tuesday, coming in with an average 0.6 rating ahead of CBS with a 0.5, Fox with a 0.3, ABC with a 0.27 and The CW with a 0.07.
“So much attention that was put on ‘How does Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) die?’ early on. How Jack dies and the big episode where, in fact, he does die,” Fogelman told Variety in an interview about featuring Rebecca’s death in the show’s penultimate episode, rather than next week’s series finale. “But so much of our series is about what happens after. And I always wanted and always had planned for the final episode of the series to revolve around the epilogue of the continuing story of the family rather than the moment,” the showrunner says. “It felt important to me to go out making the show about how the human condition and the human spirit kind of endures and moves forward, rather than just a moment that would have everybody hysterically crying because somebody passes at the end.”