'This Is Us' aims to surprise with interconnected lives, timelines

“This Is Us” is one of the new television season's standout shows.

Already something of a hit, based on the public response to a trailer posted online several months ago by NBC, the drama series — which the network debuts Tuesday, Sept. 20 — observes the lives of several people who share a birth date, and who also have surprising connections, some of which will be revealed over a timeline that will go back and forth among points in the characters' stories.

Those marking their birthday in the show include Jack (Milo Ventimiglia), whose triplet-carrying wife Rebecca (actress-singer Mandy Moore) goes into labor on that day; businessman Randall (Emmy nominee Sterling K. Brown), who locates the father who abandoned him; actor Kevin (Illinois native Justin Hartley), who rails against demands of his title role — in full view of the shocked studio audience — in a TV series called “The Manny;” and Kevin's weight-challenged sister Kate (Chrissy Metz), who finds potential romance at a support-group meeting.

Creator Dan Fogelman, also a developer of the new Fox show “Pitch,” is an executive producer of “This Is Us” along with filmmakers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. “These four interconnected storylines will all get equal time,” Fogelman explains. “And one of the stories is really going to be informing the others, and you're going to be seeing a growth of these people as we jump around in time. It's really kind of ambitious and, I think for network TV, a really bold and hopefully somewhat groundbreaking attempt to kind of explore the condition of the human family.”

For Moore, who made several other pilots and did guest arcs on series including “Grey's Anatomy,” a major appeal of “This Is Us” is the chance to dig deep in her acting. “What I find so compelling and exciting,” she says, “is being able to explore the trajectory of this marriage and having children and the toll that it takes on them both as individuals, but (also) collectively as a couple. That will be fun, to sort of balance back-and-forth and see where their marriage is seven years in, then maybe go back in time a little bit before they had the kids.”

Fogelman notes he embraces the telling of the “This Is Us” saga “out of order, and that's going to be our own way of kind of bending the genre of a dramedy to kind of keep people on their toes a little bit. The ending of the pilot is a surprise for people, and we want to continue doing that in the series. A surprise can be as small a thing as a memento that's kept in one house, then learning the origin of the story of that memento at the end of an episode. There's power in that, I think.”