This Is Us
2016–2022 · TV — Season 1-6 · Drama
The entire show is built around men naming their feelings to each other and receiving compassionate responses, and all four main male characters display a vast emotional register (Jack, Randall, Kevin, and Toby). Their emotional expression is treated as normal and valuable. Jack’s entire parenting philosophy is a deliberate rejection of his own father’s cold violence — the show frames his caregiving as his truest self and his stoicism as his undoing. The premise of the show is that the inability to name and share an emotional need is the wound at the centre of masculine life, and healing that is the work of a generation.