This is Us and we’re saying goodbye

After years of shabby treatment, Kiwi fans of America’s best prime-time soap opera can finally celebrate. We’re now able to see new episodes of This is Us the same week as they debut in the United States.

Like The Good Wife before it (and to a far lesser degree, The Blacklist), this time-jumping tale focusing on the heartwarming, laugh-eliciting and sometimes tear-inducing lives of the Pearson ‘‘triplets’’ and their extended whānau debuted with full fanfare from the network that had lobbied to secure the New Zealand rights.

By season two, despite continued critical acclaim and a loyal following, we were already months behind, before season three was quietly dropped into the Sunday afternoon graveyard.

Hopes rose when Amazon Prime Video suddenly became home to the show here, but it has taken until now for season five (which aired from October 2020 to May 2021 in the US) to debut, let alone the new sixth – and final – series, which began screening there at the start of January.

While even regular viewers, let alone newbies, could be forgiven for getting ‘‘ Lost’’ in the sometimes labyrinthine timeline of flashbacks and flash-forwards, it’s that teasing of events to come and similarities between the past and present that really give the show the extra resonance that places it above more strictly contemporary dramas such as A Million Little Things.

Creator Dan Fogelman ( Crazy, Stupid, Love) makes fabulous use of his terrific ensemble, and the acoustic guitar soundtrack and clever, often ‘‘intimate’’, framing ensures the heart-strings are regularly plucked.

There is also a wistful, welcoming Wonder Years

vibe about the sequences set in the ‘‘Big Three’s’’ early years of the 1970s and 80s, as evidenced by the first episode of the latest season (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video).

While in the present, Randall (Sterling K

Brown) is still struggling to leave behind the burglary that upended a year of his family’s life, Kate (Chrissy Metz) is learning how to navigate life as a solo parent at least half the week while husband Toby (Chris Sullivan) commutes back and forth from his job in San Francisco, and Kevin (Justin Hartley) is adjusting to ‘‘slightly awkward co-parenting’’ with Madison (Caitlin Thompson) after she jilted him at the altar, the focus is on a seminal event from early 1986.

Excitement is building in the Pearson household, and the trio even get Tang as a special treat with breakfast to celebrate this special day. The Challenger Space Shuttle is blasting off on its latest mission, with a teacher – Christa Mcauliffe – among those onboard.

However, delight turns to horror 73 seconds into the flight, as the ‘‘spaceship full of heroes’’ explodes and is viewed on a national television broadcast beamed into their classroom.

‘‘I think they are having a little problem,’’ the teacher says, while hurriedly making her exit.

That night, the triumvirate’s parents Jack

(Milo Ventimiglia) and Rebecca (Mandy Moore) worry about the effect of what they witnessed might have on the kids.

The model they used for the deaths of family fish Splishy and Splashy might not cut it this time, Rebecca believes. She frets that Randall has a compulsion to want to help people that could be detrimental to his own happiness, while this could scar the sensitive Kevin.

‘‘He’s not going to end up as some 40-year-old man still talking about the Challenger explosion,’’ Jack assures her, as we cut back to Randall’s desperation to get closure with the man accused of the burglary and Kevin contemplating whether or not to return to the TV show that launched his career, albeit in a reduced role.

Then there’s Rebecca herself, struggling to deal with the beginnings of mild cognitive impairment, something made all the more poignant by Jack’s 1980s pronouncement that he’d be lost without her – or her memory.

It’s these links and breadcrumbs that have really earned this show its reputation as an addictive, crowd-pleasing drama. Sure it might be somewhat manipulative, be almost breathless in its leaping from one crisis to the next, and chocka-block with portentous and occasionally pretentious dialogue, but it’s hard not to feel invested in what happens to these characters and take away some of what they say – and is on display – into your own life.

As Kate says to an increasingly pessimistic Kevin: ‘‘If the world stopped for all the bad stuff, it would always be dark. We have found the light before, big brother, and we’ll find it again.’’

Seasons 5 and 6 of This is Us are now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.