‘This Is Us’: Ryan Michelle Bathé Looks Back on ‘The Pool’ Episode 10 Years Later

This Is Us may have ended in 2022, but the NBC family drama is celebrating a major milestone this fall as the Dan Fogelman-created hit rings in its tenth anniversary.

And ten years ago today, on October 18, 2016, the episode “The Pool,” aired on the network, exploring a moment in time from the Pearson family’s lives when parents Rebecca (Mandy Moore) and Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) brought their kids, Kevin (Parker Bates), Randall (Lonnie Chavis), and Kate (Mackenize Hancsicsak) to the local pool, where they all face different obstacles.

One such obstacle is Rebecca coming to terms with the fact that she’s limiting Randall’s potential by not having him embrace his Blackness. She’s confronted with this reality when she goes searching for Randall on the other side of the pool, where many of the Black families are sitting, and he’s made friends.

Calling for Randall to return to the other side of the pool, Yvette (Ryan Michelle Bathé) steps in to say the young boy is fine to stay, but Rebecca won’t listen and asks Randall to come back to the other side of the pool. Before they do, Yvette comments that Randall needs to get his haircut by a Black barber because whoever is doing it now is causing him to get razor bumps.

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While the advice isn’t as appreciated by Rebecca in the moment, she eventually turns to Yvette for her wisdom about raising a young Black boy in the ’80s, with Bathé appearing in four episodes over the course of the show’s run. As “The Pool” episode rings in its tenth anniversary, Bathé is getting candid about her participation and introduction to the series.

“I knew that the show was historical. It’s one of the last great dramas, right?” Bathé points out, recognizing This Is Us as one of the most recent watercooler dramas from network television. And there’s no denying that status, as This Is Us delivered millions of viewers to NBC every week as new episodes unfolded.

“We lived through the ERs and the NYPD Blues and all of the things that bound us for the past century, and it’s like, oh wow, this thing that we thought was going to last forever is gone. And This Is Us was like the last one of its kind, you know? And so, it felt really special to be able to say that I was on that history-making and still groundbreaking show,” Bathé shares.

And despite Rebecca’s initial resistance to Yvette’s harsh truths about parenting, Bathé says, “I rock with Yvette. I think Yvette was on to something. They say lean on the village. Sometimes the village comes to you. Sometimes the village is in your face, and you have to stand up for kids,” Bathé adds of Yvette’s blunt intervention.

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“I still think that Yvette had Randall’s back,” Bathé shares, “and I have Yvette’s back. I think if I had to do it all over again, I would have done exactly the same thing as Yvette, and I can’t say that about a lot of my characters.”

“She did the right thing in trying to look out for a kid,” Bathé continues to defend Yvette. “You do need to put lotion on a child. You do need to make sure that they get the right haircut, and you do need to make sure that they are around people who are going to affirm them in all the ways that they need to be affirmed.”

“I think that Randall deserved that,” Bathé continues. “Sometimes as parents, you have to know when and where your abilities end, and you need to call in the troops, whether it’s throwing somebody in a swimming pool or putting lotion on them. There are things that I’m just not going to know, and it’s OK to say to someone else, I don’t know this thing; can you help me?”

What do you remember about The Pool episode? Reminisce in the comments section below, and relive every moment from This Is Us by streaming it anytime.

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