Still Not Over This Is Us’ Super Bowl Tragedy? Neither Is Mandy Moore
Do all the touchdown dances you want, but know that there’s at least person — aside from, uh, the San Francisco 49ers — for whom Super Bowl Sunday carries the acrid tang of dreams gone up in smoke.
On her Instagram Story Sunday night, Mandy Moore made a joke that referenced a pivotal episode of her NBC series This Is Us. The account Midwest vs. Everybody posted a photo of eight slow cookers, deeming the appliance “The real MVP of Super Bowl Sunday.” Underneath, Moore — who played mama Rebecca on the show — added: “Not in the Pearson household.”
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On a subsequent photo of the slow cooker used on the show, she wrote: “Never forget.”
As fans of the Emmy-winning series will recall, Season 2’s “Super Bowl Sunday” episode revealed the answer to a mystery the show had engaged in since its premiere: How, exactly, did Pearson family patriarch Jack (played by Milo Ventimiglia) die?
The hour, which aired directly following NBC’s broadcast of the 2018 big game, showed audiences that Jack ultimately was done in by cardiac arrest caused by smoke inhalation, a condition created by his heroics when the family’s home caught on fire in the middle of the night. The cause of the blaze: a faulty, secondhand crockpot. Not helping matters: the fact that the family hadn’t kept on top of changing the batteries in the home’s smoke detector. (Read a full recap.)
“Six years ago today… our TIU Super Bowl Sunday episode aired,” Moore wrote on a third photo, which showed her and a soot-covered Ventimiglia with Hannah Zeile and Niles Fitch, who played the teen versions of Kate and Randall, respectively. “What. A. Moment.”
In a Twitter post after the episode originally aired, series creator Dan Fogelman made sure to defend the Crock-Pot brand, which took some fan heat despite the fact that the show’s murderous hotpot was a generic one. “Taking a moment to remind everyone that it was a 20 year old fictional crockpot with an already funky switch?” he joked. “Let’s not just lump all those lovely hardworking crockpots together.”
In response, Crock-Pot took to Facebook to remind sympathize with devastated This Is Us fans and to remind the public that the cookers are safe, because they’ve been “generationally tested by your family and friends.”
Are you still mourning Jack Pearson? Hit the comments and let us know!
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