Dear Edward

The series, focused on a 12-year-old boy who survives a devastating plane crash that kills every other passenger on the flight, including his own family, ...

Is there more story to tell?’ And I definitely feel that way, so I think there’s an opening for a future.” I try not to let [the actors] see me, but, in this particular case, it’s a story so much about resilience and the power of the human spirit, and the fact that people, under these extraordinary, very difficult circumstances, are redefining themselves and finding their own power. So, I used things like that to try and help me bring life to this character and make it seem more real.” [This leads you to ask], ‘is there more that I want to know about these characters? Creator and executive producer, Jason Katims, who also helmed Friday Night Lights and Parenthood, says that in his writing process, “It’s always about people. Prepping for certain scene, he says, “I remember I would sometimes just put my head down.

Here's a tip: Maybe don't watch Dear Edward if you're traveling by plane any time soon. Based on the bestselling book by Ann Napolitano and adapted for the ...

And I think Lacey does that with a lot of bravery. Not that I’ve ever really played sports, but it feels like being in the middle of a really good game where there’s adrenaline and you’re into it. Please note that if you purchase something by clicking on a link within this story, we may receive a small commission from the sale. And I really admire that about her. Jason’s writing lays the track and that is really where I begin. I just fully face-planted into the world that Jason created. The deeper and darker places feel, there’s a sort of pleasure in it. I hadn’t read the book before shooting the show. And so that’s when she starts to realize her own strength and her own power.” He must contend with a sort of macabre celebrity status thanks to the deluge of strangers that write to him (hence, Dear Edward) while navigating tweenhood with his aunt and uncle as his guides. [Dear Edward is loosely based on a real-life](https://stylecaster.com/orange-is-the-new-black-final-premiere/) disaster—that of Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771, which went down on May 12, 2010, with 104 people on board. “When we first meet her, she thinks that her strength is in her partnership—with her husband and this perfect family she’s created and all of her beautiful clothes…

Find out everything you need to know about the new Apple TV+ show and the novel that inspired it.

[Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QNGTXNV?tag=decider08-20&asc_refurl=https://decider.com/2023/02/03/is-dear-edward-based-on-a-book/&asc_source=web), and you can start reading it immediately upon purchase. If you prefer paperback, you can get Dear Edward for $14.13 from [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0241985897/?tag=decider08-20&asc_refurl=https://decider.com/2023/02/03/is-dear-edward-based-on-a-book/&asc_source=web) or $16.74 from [Bookshop](https://go.skimresources.com?id=93051X1547101&xs=1&xcust=dec-CT--&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fp%2Fbooks%2Fdear-edward-ann-napolitano%2F16071619%3Fean%3D9781984854803), an online store that supports local independent bookstores. [Libro.fm](https://go.skimresources.com?id=93051X1547101&xs=1&xcust=dec-CT--&url=https%3A%2F%2Flibro.fm%2F), which supports independent bookstores, offers a one-month free trial and your first credit free. [Dear Edward](http://decider.com/show/dear-edward) is the latest drama to premiere on [Apple TV+](https://tv.apple.com/). Otherwise, it’s one credit for existing Audible members or $16.18 to purchase à la carte. Narrated by Cassandra Campbell, it clocks in at 11 hours and 35 minutes. It follows Edward Adler (Colin O’Brien), a 12-year-old boy who is the lone survivor of a plane crash that kills his entire family. Like in her book, the crash only had [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/198485478X/?tag=decider08-20&asc_refurl=https://decider.com/2023/02/03/is-dear-edward-based-on-a-book/&asc_source=web) for $16.98. [book](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1984854801?tag=decider08-20&asc_refurl=https://decider.com/2023/02/03/is-dear-edward-based-on-a-book/&asc_source=web), which is also partially inspired by a true story. Three episodes of the series hit the streaming service on Feb. [Friday Night Lights](https://decider.com/show/friday-night-lights/) and [Parenthood](https://decider.com/show/parenthood/), among others.

While the title character is one of the least interesting of the bunch, Connie Britton's Dee Dee is absolutely stealing the show.

To calm him or to take his mind off things, she brings him to the family’s metal-fabrication shop and teaches him how to use the machines. • Is it just me, or is the offer from Gary’s parents to have Linda live with them in L.A., where they can help care for her and their late son’s child, not so bad? The mystery girl from the grocery store slides a letter for Edward through the door and runs off. She figures out that the head is from the gift shop at the Museum of the Odd and Peculiar and decides they should go on an adventure. And of course, he and Becks are going to help her get those signatures. For someone like Dee Dee to admit this — to realize it in the first place — shows us that there’s a lot more to her than how she presents herself to the world. Dee Dee and Linda end up at the Wreck Room — which Dee Dee originally believed was a “depraved sex club” Charles was using to cheat on her but is actually one of those places where you’re allowed to smash and break things for cathartic reasons — and they smash the hell out of some shit. He talks about Jordan and his parents as if they’re still here; he invents a future for them. It’s nice to see Dee Dee and Linda bonding outside of group (though Dee Dee really had to be worn down, didn’t she?), and there’s another great pairing in this episode: Adriana and Kojo. Maybe it’s that he’s so closed off to the world, as a way to protect himself, that he remains just a little bit unknowable. She loved it so much that maybe she “put blinders on” to keep the dream of it real. In the episode “Stuff,” thanks to both Britton’s performance and Megan Chan Meinero’s writing, Dee Dee begins to reveal more of her complexities.

A 12-year-old boy (Colin O'Brien) who survived the plane crash that killed his immediate family goes to live with his aunt (Taylor Schilling) in “Dear Edward.”.

The 10-episode run ends with the promise of a second season, and that seems like a mixed blessing. There are moments of lightness and laughter, times of joy and optimism, but we’re never far from another reminder this is primarily a series about the ways in which we grieve. The gimmick of having Edward talking to his older brother Jordan (Maxwell Jenkins) as if Jordan is still there by his side is more unsettling than dramatically effective. - Anna Uzele’s Adriana decides to run for the congressional seat of her late grandmother, a towering and pioneering political legend. That Lacey and John have been trying for years to have a child, with Lacey having two miscarriages, and that Lacey had a sometimes contentious relationship with her sister (Robin Tunney), only complicates matters. Everyone onboard dies except 12-year-old Edward (Colin O’Brien), a sensitive and brilliant boy who was having trouble coping with the world outside his family’s protective cocoon (he was home-schooled) even before this tragedy.

A review of the new Apple TV+ series from Jason Katims.

Those looking for something to fill that “This Is Us”-shaped hole in their media diet will flock to “Dear Edward”; after all, both shows have all the airy, acoustic-guitar contemplation of a laundry detergent commercial. Where everyone else feels like a zombie shuffling through the ruins of their deteriorated lives, she demands to see life’s manager, and it’s delightful. Granted, it’s all performed with admirable grace and confidence thanks to a committed cast that, at the very least, keeps the thing aloft in each tearjerking moment. All he has to cling to is the memory of his brother and the guilt of knowing that a game of rock-paper-scissors over which seat they’d take sealed their respective fates. His youth and innocence compound the tragedy that’s befallen him, an orphaned boy thrust both into a family situation that wasn’t prepared for him and a media landscape that makes him the repository of everything from well-intentioned love to oversharing to conspiracies and death threats. In the wake of the crash, they find community in the form of a corporate-sponsored support group, where their lives intersect in all the ways you’d expect of a maudlin melodrama such as this.

In the story, a 12-year-old boy named Edward (Colin O'Brien) is the sole survivor of a plane crash that kills, among many others, his entire family. He goes ...

And when they are briefly not sad, even that is sad, or at least bittersweet, because what in the life of a person deep in grief is not, even at its sweetest, only bittersweet? And yet, even as I watched it and felt a bit put off by it, I never doubted that it will have an audience. But what we tend to mean in common usage when we refer to sentimentality as manipulative is that it's too direct, a straight line rather than an interesting path we've never walked from provocation to response. This is a rip-your-guts-out show. Dee Dee (Connie Britton) is a wealthy woman who lost her husband, and she's now forced to both forge some kind of independence and confront some things she learns about him only now that he's gone. I sort of found myself wishing they got more into this part of Edward's struggle, that they stayed with a little narrower focus. This is a weird thing art does that always seems weirder when it's somebody else's art than when it's yours. Without spoiling too much, it seems clear that the intent is to explore these letter-writers more in a future season; this theme only begins to emerge in this first set of episodes. And while Katims didn't make This Is Us, it's the recent show by which Dear Edward feels the most inspired. (The book, based on what I know of it, does not do this in the same way, although it does tell the stories of other people who die on the plane). It is extraordinarily impressive to get people to enjoy their own agony this much, and most people have some kind of art that does something similar for them. The only person he really relates to in his new home is an extroverted neighbor girl his age named Shay (Eva Ariel Binder).

Taylor Schilling and Connie Britton headline Jason Katims' adaptation of Ann Napolitano's 2020 novel.

The whole thing just feels maudlin, which is saying a lot given that it’s about the loved ones of plane crash victims. The only ones they know, though are ones they’ve heard at seders, namely the blessings of the wine and bread. Our Take: The first episode of Dear Edward more or less sets up how we get to the what the rest of the series is going to be about. Dee Dee feels like a bit of a parody of the character Britton played in The White Lotus, and while don’t get a clear picture of Lacey’s connection to the people on the plane until later in the episode, we do know that by the second episode we didn’t like her very much. Katims has always stuffed his shows with “the feels,” moments where you’re looking to reach for the tissues or pretend that you’re still sniffly from cutting onions for dinner. She tries to help the mentally disabled brother of a constituent, but that proves to be futile. The loved ones who are left grieving after the plane crash in the first episode, at least the small subset that are following, will experience different emotions, find unexpected relationships, and unlock secrets. As it tries to do an emergency landing in Denver, Jane regrets taking the first class seat away from her family, and Eddie looks to Jordan for reassurance. The darkness just gets to be too much, and its hard to balance the grief with “life moments,” for lack of a better term, that can be lighthearted or mundane. The plane crashes, and the crash site shows devastation, but there’s one survivor. Jordan, always in his smarter brother’s shadow, wants to use the fresh start to go to public school, much to the chagrin of Jane and their father Bruce (Brian D’Arcy James). This is the first time he hasn’t been there, but he’s flying to Los Angeles on business.

Creator Jason Katims on Dear Edward, adapting the novel, reuniting with Connie Britton, and telling emotionally moving stories.

And sometimes when I watch an episode, the things that feel most emotional to me are not the things that I imagine they would be in the script. We wanted to make it feel authentic and make it feel real. What I’m looking to do is dig into the complexities of relationships, the silences in conversations, what they really mean, and the humor. It’s a common fear that people have, and I was definitely bracing for how it would be portrayed in this and how that would make me feel. I wanted to do a story about what happens after this tragedy happens, and follow what happens to these people. I wanted to see people from different backgrounds and different backstories, and who were also very different, in terms of who it was they lost in the crash. As someone who is terrified of flying, but who does it anyway, I dread having to see plane crashes or even bad flights in movies and TV shows. When it came to adding characters that weren’t in the book, what was the process for making those decisions? Was it just about what you need to keep the story going for a longer time span? Even if all the characters were not necessarily the same, and the plot moves were not necessarily the same, the heart of the story was something that I really loved. There were also relationships and storylines that were critical, that were directly from the book. But as he goes on his journey of self-discovery to figure out what comes next, a grief group forms that leads to new friendships and romances, showing even the most lost among them just how resilient and brave they really are.