After a summer in which high-profile figures like Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade-who, as far as the public understood, lived lives of success and advantage-died by suicide, the audience has likely come to understand just how complicated private lives can be.

The problem is that the question is not so easily revealed. The question the show seeks to answer is why someone who was such an effective pillar of support for his friends, all of whom seem less together than he does, made such an irrevocable choice. Ron Livingston’s Jon, a wealthy and well-loved businessman, dies by suicide in the pilot’s early moments. Unlike its predecessor, though, “Things’s” central loss happens in the show’s present, right at the start, and its characters are as in the dark as we are. To wit: Like “This Is Us,” “A Million Little Things” has a death at its center, and is consumed with both the mechanics of grief and the mystery around the incident. That difference makes for a pilot that’s both intriguing, as we see the bits of deception underpinning an all-male clique, and frustrating, as it often strains credulity as well as certain boundaries of taste. And yet ABC’s “ A Million Little Things,” a show that borrows “This Is Us’s” mystery-box conceit and open-wound emotionality, moves the action from an immediate family to a group of friends. In a development as predictable as night following day, “This Is Us”-network TV’s defining critical and commercial hit-has its first high-profile imitator.

A million little things episodes