If you don’t watch "This Is Us," I can almost guarantee that you wish you had a family like the Pearsons. A beautiful mother with a singing talent, a tough and supportive father, who may have a '70s pornstache but has a heart of gold and three adorable kids who grow up to become wonderful human beings.

They play football in the front yard of their picturesque home, which in today’s market has to be at least $350,000. Another family of Joneses to keep up with; another white picket fence. The Pearsons give off the notion that they are perfect in those tender snippets that NBC shows. Why? Because they talk their feelings. Even my family doesn't talk their feelings enough.

If you are a fan of "This Is Us" like I am you may not be so envious of the Pearsons. For one, there is death. Losing a grandparent feels like a stab in the heart. I can only imagine what losing a parent is like.

The Pearson “Big Three” lost their father, who was the cheerleader of the family. The one who sees his daughter as the most beautiful person in the entire universe despite her weight. The one who tapes his son’s football games and puts him up on the highest pedestal. The one who takes his son on college trips to Harvard and Howard without being the goofy dad.

The cause of his death is still a mystery, much to the chagrin of fans. How he died does not matter. What matters is he didn’t deserve it.

Randall, who Jack and Rebecca adopted after one of their triplets died in childbirth, became part of the “Big Three.” However, he was lucky enough to meet his biological father William.

If losing one father couldn’t break him, Randall lost William to cancer. Although their father and his death are what binds the “Big Three,” they deal with their grief in completely different ways.

For example, Kate eats. My theory is that it doesn’t make her forget the pain, but it connects her to Jack. In "The Fifth Wheel," the Pearsons go visit a lake house for summer vacation.

Rebecca is overly cautious of little Kate’s weight, asking Jack to lay off the trips to the ice cream parlor. He tries to help by saying playing football with him and Kevin will do her good, to which she runs off. When Jack catches Kate alone on a bench, she reveals a kid called her fat and asks Jack if she is fat. He responds in a very fatherly way, saying,

"You are my favorite-looking person on the planet."

After, he took her to the ice cream parlor to get the puppy dog look off her face. Those summer daddy-daughter trips to the ice cream parlor made her think of her father, thinking of his constant want to make her smile.

Randall has anxiety with extreme breakdowns. Breakdowns where he is on the floor and crying. He is a perfectionist to a point where it is obsessive in order to make both his parents proud.

He gets perfect SATs and a perfect GPA in high school so he can get into the perfect college. Jack goes into proud parent mode when Randall looks at Harvard, so much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if they show him in full Harvard garb. What Randall really wanted was Howard, to change his already all-white environment, which he had difficulty saying to Jack.

The mention of Harvard made him light up, which was Randall’s goal, but the status quo that he previously lived in was not what he wanted. That is seen in the way he quits his fancy job, which no one can explain, with a boss who doesn’t have the audacity to give a personal card after William dies.

Or how he takes in a foster child, despite intending to take in his parents’ footsteps by starting from scratch and adopting an infant.

Addiction was perhaps the worst part of Jack, and Kevin is taking after that... becoming quite the addict himself.

Kevin denied his father’s death by refusing to talk about it. It numbed the pain of not having enough big acting gigs, of his failed relationship and of his strained self-esteem.

He was the forgotten one.

Randall had Rebecca because he was easier to love and didn’t recoil when she touched him. Kate had Jack because he made her feel worthy enough to love herself. Kevin was just alone because he was thought of as the independent one, yet he may have been the one who needed the most love.

He literally cries out to a one-night stand that he just needs help. He feels unworthy of love, especially from his father’s love, so he abuses his body.

The most real scene of this season came from “The Fifth Wheel,” where the family visits Kevin in rehab after his DUI. In the therapy session, there is only Kevin, Kate, Rebecca and Randall.

At first, their demeanor towards Kevin is polite. But this is where many families go wrong...trust me, I have experienced it firsthand. Feelings are bottled up for decades, and when the feelings eventually come out, because they will, it gets ugly.

The perfect Pearsons that non-fans see would think that the episode ends at polite. Fans know that "This Is Us" is so close to real that we can feel it and see it in our own families.

The show gets it right, so it doesn’t end at polite. The therapist addresses the fakeness of the interaction, which gets them to admit their father’s addiction, as well as how that addiction was inherited by Kate and Kevin.

This is when the ugly part comes.

Rebecca can admit Jack was an addict, but she acts as if it was such a damaging quality. A funny thing about the dead is that we don’t want to bring up their flaws, which leaves things left unsaid.

It’s as if problems around the dead are some kind of taboo or an unspoken rule among families. This particular episode laid all the Pearsons’ problems out for viewers to see, which not enough families do.

In this sense, "This Is Us" is more real than real.

Of course, the therapy session ends in Randall telling off Kevin for saying Rebecca's favorite child is Randall, which cuts the session short. Many could argue that this episode, as well as many of the episodes this season, are “too depressing.”

That is why I applaud the show for its authenticity and am more in awe of each episode. There isn’t a typical happy movie ending. It ends how all of us conclude a bad day or tough therapy session: in tears with feelings left on the table.

Sure, we all have that one family that we wish we had. Right now, I’m scrolling through Instagram and doing the same. The thing is, that online family probably has as many problems or more than our own families. That is why it can be so healing watching the show and dealing with our own families.

My papa died not long before William died in the show. I could feel the anguish in Randall when he drove home without William because I feel it myself. Although funerals are hard, hoping you are coming home with a loved one on the way to the hospital and the absence of them coming out of the hospital is the hardest.

I soaked in how Randall reacted on the ride home in the episode “Memphis." He wasn’t sobbing, but he was at peace. He took William’s advice to “roll all [his] windows down [and] crank up the music.”

I only wish I had that advice when my papa passed away. I may not have had that advice, but I did use Doctor K’s advice from the pilot episode in my papa’s eulogy.

Take “the sourest lemon that life has to offer and [turn] it into something resembling lemonade.”

If you haven’t already, I recommend that you binge this show because it comes in full circle to all of life’s most heart-wrenching and heartwarming moments.