Dan Fogelman
speaker
160 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Dan Fogelman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is why. We had to. Because I was very worried about the, like I needed the audience to follow the time jump. Recognize him, but we pushed it. And then I remember not being pleased with it, but knowing it was getting the job done for what I needed to get done. And then we started pulling back. Then we started to pull back as time went on. He lost a little weight.
Well, I'm... That was a particularly, when we found her, I was like, oh, this is gonna really, really work. That was cool.
You should watch the show, Sully.
You know, I don't know. I mean, I think that the extra hook doesn't hurt if it's natural to your show propulsion. Sure. And like in this era where there is a lot of things competing for attention, like can beautiful only hold people anymore? Yeah. You'd like to think it could, but you do need, I mean,
if you look at succession as an example of a show that's kind of cut through like that was a family thing but then they had like they had this looming question of who's gonna win who's gonna succeed the father they had a murder in the first season like you know what i mean like yeah and you do it's hard you know you look at the shows that are successful right now you know severance white lotus
you know, our new show, there's a propulsion and often a mystery to them that is making audiences demand to go click on them. And we had that in a very surprising genre. And we tried to keep it going throughout because it was something people liked about the show without it ever overwhelming, which is what secrets is Jack holding? What is the secret of the future storyline?
How do all these pieces intersect? And I think we did it really successfully it's kind of giving people the treat to go with the medicine. And so I think that was something that was organically built into the show. Do you need it nowadays? I don't know, but it sure doesn't hurt if you have it. If you're trying to make noise, it doesn't hurt. Dan doesn't know because he always has it.
It definitely unfolded as it went along. We liked to present that we had the whole thing figured out from the beginning, but the truth was it unfolded every season, and we would find little things and then go back. Like I was speaking about earlier,
realizing we had pictures of the kids as young kids all over the show and then realizing, oh, it'll be good if Jack grabbed some pictures from the house during the fire. That is a small example of how it would like evolve.
Yeah, but in reality, if I'm being honest, one of my great regrets, if I could do it all over again, is I would have done that all at the beginning of season one with those kids and with Mandy and Milo. And I would have like spent six months shooting tons of stuff. And then that could, and that could boyhood style.
And that could have been the sixth season of the show, kind of like in some ways of the backstories. Um, I didn't have the foresight that I did it after the second or third season when we were like having great success, even though, so it's like, it's always a hybrid of like, it, it wasn't all just like, kind of like preformed.
We didn't have another plan. There was, at the end of the show, there was like a little bit of conversation of... You know, nobody really wanted it to end. I knew it needed to end. And there was a little bit of conversation about talking about the family when we get to the very, very end of the series of doing something with the family whose lives intersected with Jack at the hospital that night.
And maybe making a completely different family born out of the night of tragedy that we would then go off and follow. So it would be more of a spinoff than a continuation. And at the end of the day, it's just, I was like, I don't want to do this without the guys. I kind of need to step back from family dramas. And we just couldn't quite figure out that we had the appetite for it.
But that was the only place that it ever came up.
We always talked about a couple of different pivots that like This Is Us could potentially be a genre about a family with each family has their own story to tell and the lives that intersected and the mysteries of that family. But I just couldn't see a way. We had hit our limit of runway with, we'd gone so deep in the future. I just didn't know how to continue the story any further.
Yeah, I mean, the ironic part is my father, who's like a big, kind of like growing up was like a big Jewish James Gandolfini type, was like, I'm Jack, right?
Yeah, definitely. Like, I can't believe, like, I'm Jack. Yeah.
Yeah, I pictured him a little bit more, like, kind of normal, like, pictured, like, meaning, like, just a normal, like, I pictured him kind of like me, like, right? But I always thought that the example I give was that... Seth Rogen turned the park down. Yeah. Yeah. I pictured that the opening shot when you see his ass would be funny.
I thought it would be like, you know, when your wife sees like you, regular guy's ass and she loves you. And they laugh. She loves you and she laughs. But like, it's not like she's like so hot that she needs you that moment. Yeah.
Yeah. But the ironic part about Jack in those opening seasons is like, he's a very flawed dude. Like, I mean, this is a guy who's made decisions old school style for his family, his wife. He's like very explosive at her at times. He is an alcoholic. And like, and I always struck me that like, So many women would come after Rebecca and be like, be happy. He's hot and he's kind and he cares.
Showing 121–140 of 160 · page 7 of 8
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