This is Us and we’re saying goodbye

Wonder Years 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.’’