This Is Us has spent six seasons telling the saga of the Pearson family across multiple generations, but that saga will come to an end in May. While fans will have to say goodbye to the Pearsons in less than three months, that won’t necessarily mean losing the cast from television. Milo Ventimiglia, who has been playing Jack from the very beginning despite the character’s death in Season 2, has landed his next big TV role. The news comes shortly after he weighed in on where his career could take him after This Is Us, and his new character is definitely no Jack Pearson!
Milo Ventimiglia has signed on to star in and executive produce a new project called The Company You Keep, which Deadline reports has received a pilot order from ABC. The actor would play a con man by the name of Charlie, who falls in love with Emma – who happens to be an undercover CIA agent – after a night together, despite the fact that their career paths are bound to collide in the worst way. Charlie will try to get out of the family business of running cons while Emma works to apprehend the criminal who controls Charlie’s family’s debts. The question is whether they can deal with the lies they’ve had to tell and manage to save themselves and their families from terrible repercussions.
Even though This Is Us hasn’t come to an end yet, I feel pretty comfortable saying that fans aren’t going to get a reveal that Jack and Rebecca Pearson ever had a relationship like what The Company You Keep has going on with Charlie and Emma! A con man/CIA agent dynamic isn’t what had Milo Ventimiglia and Mandy Moore exchanging vows back in the early days of This Is Us.
There are no details about who would play the Emma to Ventimiglia’s Charlie for The Company You Keep, but Ventimiglia would executive produce along with HBO Max’s Degrassi co-creator Julia Cohen, who is also writing the pilot. Cohen already has connections to some successful series for ABC, as she has served as a co-executive producer on Quantico and – more recently – A Million Little Things.
The project is based on a Korean format called My Fellow Citizens that ran for upward of 30 episodes, but is currently only in the pilot stage at ABC. There’s no guarantee that The Company You Keep will ever advance beyond the pilot order, but casting a talented actor with as much name recognition as Milo Ventimiglia fresh off of This Is Us seems like a great way to get the project off the ground. It has also been in the works for some time. Back in January, Deadline listed it as a project being “buzzed about” for the upcoming slate of network TV pilots. It’s also worth noting that ABC found a hit with another project based on a Korean series, with the often emotional The Good Doctor.
If The Company You Keep does well enough as a pilot to earn a series order at NBC, This Is Us fans might not have to miss Milo Ventimiglia’s presence in primetime for all that long. Even though Charlie the con man is certainly not somebody who will be confused with Jack Pearson, he would keep the popular actor’s TV streak going. For now, you can look forward to seeing more of Ventimiglia in new episodes of This Is Us’ final season, airing on Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on NBC in the 2022 TV schedule. If you want to revisit the earlier days of Jack Pearson, you can find all six seasons of This Is Us so far streaming with a Hulu subscription.
