Isaac Aptaker & Elizabeth Berger and Us | Showrunners of This Is Us
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Who are the showrunners of This Is Us?
I and Ian, hi!
Hi, guys.
What up, gang? How are you? We're great. We're happy to be here.
We're very happy to be here. It just feels so cozy. It feels so nice.
We're so happy to have you. I just found out, as we were finishing the show in 2022, were you pregnant in 2022? Were you just had the baby in 2021?
I had my son halfway through season three.
Through season three?
Yeah.
Okay. So he's how old, Ian?
Now he's five.
He's five, and then you just, you have a one-year-old.
And a three-year-old in the middle. That's the one I'm talking about. The three-year-old was the one that you were at the end of the shoot.
Everybody's having babies. I'm getting lapped.
I know.
That's right. I was like the only person that had babies. It was me and Justin, because he had his older daughter or whatnot. Now, this is a question I have for both of you right now, because you both have three, just like Rebecca on the show. Is it an incremental step up from two, or is it an exponential step up from two?
You have more experience, so I'm gonna- Nothing was harder than one to two. One to two was the biggest job. It was also, it was like, my son was 21 months old. We had been living through a pandemic We were very isolated. By the time she was born, my daughter, we were running on empty, I would say. My son was welcomed into a much more, my third child. Second son. Second son. It's very confusing. He was welcomed into a much more normal world where we had community and friends. And I think that made the biggest difference. But I'm curious what you think.
I mean, I'm still like in the beginning phase with just an eight week old, but... It does, you're right. My oldest was born during the pandemic and Ozzy was born like at the end of our show, or I guess like the end of that year that the show ended. And he was born into a slightly more normal world. And now she is just like, Yeah, it's like, you're right. The community, the camaraderie that you have with your friends. And I feel like my friends are all having their second kids now. So it's nice to at least be able to go through that with people.
It's huge. You're like, oh, this is what it's supposed to be like. You have a baby, people come visit, you go places, you sit in the park with your friends. We didn't have that for a very long time. So I think, yeah, that's hugely different.
And was all of this life change where you kept injecting so many children into this TV show?
And every turn, there's a new baby in this. What's weird though, like when we started the show, like none of us, like including Dan, had kids. So we were like, the three of us were kind of like doing this thing, like a lot of the writers did, and that was great. But we would be like, kind of guessing at what it was like. And now you watch the show. And now like I have a 10-month-old at home. I'm like, oh, like that's what I was writing about.
Yeah, exactly.
And we were guessing what it was like to be a parent.
Totally. Totally. I think we did okay, guys. We did pretty well. I was thinking, and rewatching the show recently, I was like, wow, this is very interesting. We all, we acted this, we wrote this without really doing it. And I think we did pretty good. I was like, this is what it feels like. It's a good show.
For everybody who loves This Is Us, you've already met Dan Fogelman on our podcast. But Isaac and Elizabeth are really highly, highly responsible for why you love this show.
Yeah, the world that was created.
The world that was created. And they were our showrunners. And I can describe it, but I bet you could describe it better for anyone listening who maybe doesn't understand maybe what a showrunner is, including myself. What's a showrunner?
What does a showrunner do and could I do it? I mean, if you think of like a TV show as a small company with probably 200 people on This Is Us, a showrunner is kind of responsible for kind of running the thing and keeping it all moving.
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