In today’s golden era of television, it’s a tad shocking that This Is Us became such a broad success. For one, major networks don’t tend to stockpile their lineups with serialized family dramedies mixed with anthological period pieces. As a result, NBC’s newest star offers a change of pace to a schedule filled to the brim with The Voice and more Chicago dramas than any reasonable person would ask for. To be clear, after the dozens (hundreds or maybe thousands?) of television shows throughout history that have leaned on flashbacks, This Is Us isn’t necessarily breaking new ground solely by juxtaposing glimpses of the past with the present day. It separates itself from its predecessors by weaving together its seemingly disparate storylines from several time periods into one coherent narrative that comments profoundly on the essence of time. Consider Kevin’s painting and accompanying speech at the end of “The Game Plan” to be this show’s manifesto on how memories of the past and moments of the present together form a greater whole. Inside the fiction, Kevin delivers the monologue in reference to his play, The Back of an Egg, but it’s easily reinterpreted into a statement about the way This Is Us reflects what we perceive as life.

Kevin’s speech ramps up as soon as he begins reciting the story of his family coming to America. Theoretically, we can trace time from a certain starting point, in this case his ancestor’s arrival in New York, to now in a simple, straight line. In practice, that’s not how we actually remember the past. Kevin’s abstract collage of brush strokes going in every which direction on a canvas doesn’t resemble any semblance of order. Its sprawling colors signify how our memory truly works as a collection of fragmented snippets. Through its episodic flashbacks, This Is Us demonstrates how our memories don’t have any observable pattern to them and aren’t subject to the usual constraints of time’s one-way nature. That’s why the Big Three might be teens one week whereas the next we can watch Jack and Rebecca growing as a couple before the kids were even born. Although within a single episode, the flashbacks tell a mostly straightforward story, they are self-contained and don’t flow into each other. That’s why the painting looks so disjointed. The colors, standing in for the function of memory, lie all around with little direction.

If we zoom in close, we can barely make out that there is indeed a top layer of lines that appears in full, nothing hidden or otherwise obscured from view. Unlike with the splotchy background, we can indeed trace these lines from end to end. In the narrative, the present-day storyline of the Pearsons navigating adult life represent the lines most recently added to the picture. Longer-term arcs marked by emotional character-building moments and dramatic twists unfold in one direction as time marches onward and the season progresses from pilot to finale. Central to the analogy is that these newest lines on the painting do not erase those beneath them. Rather, all these colors stack on top of each other. In other words, what we do today bases itself upon the foundation set by what happened yesterday. This Is Us doesn’t revisit the past just because it’s groovy to look back at the 80s and the jeans overalls we considered fashionable. Instead the flashbacks inform the present storyline. The adult Pearsons approach their problems the ways they do specifically because of what they have learned from past memories.

Take Kate’s struggles with her weight: in a single episode, we’ll watch memories of her as a child trying to cope with living in her skinny mother’s shadow and then see the older version of her working towards stepping out of that shadow. Together, past and present compose a single story about her becoming who she wants to be without being both physically and mentally weighed down by her insecurities. Just as older, dried up lines of paint support the newest brush strokes on Kevin’s masterpiece, memories of bygone moments form the foundation for the current storyline playing out with these characters.

The key to the message is that the present-day aspect of the show, despite being from one perspective the culmination of all that came before, is not the finished product. The lines we add to the painting today will soon dry up and become memories as well, supporting a new story that forms a new superficial layer. Eventually, that layer again will give way to another that lies above it, and so on. A few episodes pull back the curtain on this depth by taking the timeline to even before Jack and Rebecca’s marriage. Most significantly, the finale takes place virtually entirely in flashbacks. We watch Jack and Rebecca’s marriage fall apart while witnessing memories of some of the personality flaws that have haunted them since before they even met. Rebecca’s dedication to a career that may never take off and Jack’s instincts to take more control of life than he perhaps should rear their ugly heads in the early memories, explaining why the second set of memories unfold as the do. As we experience new moments, we’re fueling life, not consuming it. Moments of today transform into memories that give way to tomorrow’s new beginnings, which later turn into memories too. Life is the perpetual creation of new memories.

If we take a step back and squint enough, we can’t separate out the older, faded colors from the new ones on the surface. Considering life in the aggregate, time loses meaning. What we identify as “now” is both constructed upon and blends seamlessly into the memories that we consider “the past.” If somebody asks you how old Randall is in the show, the correct answer is to tilt your head and look at them like they’re speaking Klingon. Sure, taking a magnifying glass to the show in order to examine a single scene, it’s easy to respond that he’s nine, or 36, or whatever age he happens to be in that one instance. In the context of the show as a whole, however, the question is nonsense. We can’t easily distinguish between yesterday and today when considering the big picture. It all blurs into one. Everything is distilled into stunningly beautiful colors that both connect to and stack upon each other. There is no beginning nor end, there is only “Us.”