This Is Us Took a Major Gamble for Its Season 4 Premiere

Season four of This Is Us premiered last night, September 24, on NBC, and it was a big shake-up, to say the least. In fact, the first 40 minutes can best be described as confusing. The only familiar main characters we saw for a while were Jack and Rebecca, who were fresh off their Los Angeles road trip. Their storyline was straightforward: Rebecca invites Jack to have dinner at her parents' country club and warns him that they're capital-S Snobs. At first, though, it seems like he's won them over—that is, until Rebecca's dad pulls Jack aside and says he'll do anything in his power to stop their relationship. So expect drama on that front.

Everything else about the episode was a big departure from what we've come to expect from This Is Us. We were introduced to three new characters: a blind aspiring singer in his twenties; a mother returning from war with PTSD; and a teen boy with a son. We watched their narratives unfold with no exposition, which perplexed many viewers. Who are these people? And why should we care about them?

Here are just a few fans who were scratching their heads last night:

In true This Is Us fashion, we soon got the answer. The blind singer is actually baby Jack, Kate and Toby's son, all grown up. (In a bombshell ending, we learn that an eye procedure to fix Jack's blindness didn't work, and that his vision won't return.) The teen boy is one of Deja's classmates, whom she develops a crush on. As for the mom with PTSD? We don't know much about her—just that she has some connection to Uncle Nicky.

Introducing all these new characters so late into the series is a gamble, but showrunner Dan Fogelman hopes fans will come to love them as much as they do Jack, Rebecca, and the Big Three.

"I have a lot of faith in our fans," he tells Glamour. "I think people who are watching the show religiously for three years now, it’s not like we’re doing an entire season of television without the Big Three in it. This is a starting point for our first episode, and our next three, four, five episodes are just wildly traditional episodes of the show."

He continues, "Of course you get anxious and you go, 'Oh, it’s a weird feeling to not see your cast that you’re familiar with on the show,' but we’ve just always planned this. I think having Jack and Rebecca so prominent in this storyline [in the first episode] anchors us in this really exciting time period where we are, and I believe the payoff in the end earns it and sends us forward in a really exciting direction."

Fogelman adds that Kate (Chrissy Metz), Kevin (Justin Hartley), and Randall (Sterling K. Brown) will still play major parts in the season. This first episode was just an experimental launching pad.

"I think one of the great exciting benefits of having so many seasons of the show picked up and have the show having become popular and also having our fans being so devoted and loyal is that you can do things like this and take people on a ride," he says. "Hopefully, we’ve earned people’s trust."

The This Is Us fandom is nothing if not loyal. This stunt may have thrown a few of them, sure, but they're not going anywhere. I'm certainly not—especially not after baby Jack's song at the end of the episode. He hooked me after singing just a few high notes. This show.

This Is Us airs Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. ET on NBC.

Originally Appeared on Glamour