For two seasons, the hit NBC series “This Is Us” left a mysterious hole at the center of its family saga: What caused the death of Jack Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia), the loving husband of Rebecca (Mandy Moore) and father of three? Even as adults, Jack’s children are rarely seen discussing the tragedy that ended his life years earlier. In an episode that aired earlier this month, fans finally got an answer. It’s the night of the Super Bowl, and all three kids have ditched their dad to watch the game elsewhere. We see Jack alone in the kitchen, putting leftover crudité into plastic bags, wiping ranch dressing off the counter. He powers down the family’s ancient slow cooker, used to make the Super Bowl chili, and shuts off the lights. In the dark kitchen, we see the slow cooker briefly flicker on. The machine then shorts out and catches flame, and the fire spreads throughout the house. Jack’s fate is sealed by a janky cooking gadget.
The twenty-four hours after the episode aired were devastating—for “This Is Us” viewers, certainly, but even more so for Crock-Pot. The device in the episode was not visibly marked with the company’s brand insignia, but the Crock-Pot, which has been around since 1971, is by far the most recognized maker of slow cookers. It was toward Crock-Pot, therefore, that fans directed their grief and anger over their favorite character’s demise. “I’ve been married less than two months and suddenly I feel the need to remove the Crock-Pot from the registry,” one person on Twitter wrote. “I just threw my Crock-Pot out the window,” another said. Fans on social media demanded justice as if a real person had been murdered: “Jack is dead because of a faulty crockpot,” one wrote on Facebook. “Shame on you! I hope his family sues! I’ll definitely be warning my friends and family!”
“This Is Us” is famous for triggering strong emotions in its fans (see this list of the show’s “most satisfying cries,” but a source close to the production told me that the creators didn’t anticipate the intensity of the rage that would be unleashed against the Crock-Pot. The choice of a slow cooker as a fatal weapon, the source said, was somewhat arbitrary; the writers were only looking for a plot device that wouldn’t be obvious to viewers, and that wouldn’t place blame for Jack’s death on other characters. The slow cooker could easily have been a toaster, or a microwave, or a dysfunctional rice cooker. The “This Is Us” showrunner, Dan Fogelman, was so taken aback by the anti-Crock-Pot outpouring that he came to the brand’s defense on Twitter: “Taking a moment to remind everyone that it was a 20 year old fictional crockpot with an already funky switch? Let's not just lump all those lovely hard-working crockpots together.” (A Consumer Reports study shows that, between 2012 and 2015, slow cookers caused a hundred and three fires and only two injuries, neither of them fatal, a small fraction of the damage caused by other appliances.)
Crock-Pot, meanwhile, determined that it had no choice but to play along. A Crock-Pot spokesperson told me that the company launched its first-ever Twitter account “so we could comfort fans over the loss of Jack and at the same time share facts about safety.” On Facebook, some of Crock-Pot’s two million followers created the hashtag #CrockPotIsInnocent, which began trending. The meme came full circle just before the Super Bowl, when that hashtag was used in an ad released by “This Is Us” in partnership with Crock-Pot, showing Jack Pearson ladling himself a bowl of chili out of a Crock-Pot and beseeching fans to “find the ability to forgive.”
No subset of the population watched all of this with more satisfaction than users of the kitchen-gadget newcomer Instant Pot. “After watching tonight’s episode of This Is Us, was anyone else's very first thought, ‘my instant pot would never betray me like that!’” one wrote on Twitter. “What if the entire emotional arc of #ThisIsUs were just an extended infomercial for @InstantPot?” another added. But in the end, Crock-Pot’s TV cameo may have been a succès de scandale. A spokesperson from the company told me that it’s too early to tell whether the incident has affected sales, but afterwards Crock-Pot decals that read “Unplug me . . . love, Jack” appeared to be trending on Etsy, and Google searches for “Crock-Pot” spiked. The following episode of “This Is Us” revealed that Jack and his family made it out of their burning house unscathed, but Jack went back inside to save his daughter’s dog, and the extra smoke he inhaled during that rescue mission sent him into cardiac arrest. The night that episode aired, just as quickly as the Crock-Pot drama unfolded, a new narrative took hold: blame the dog.