Grief and mourning are a tough topic for television. There’s a reason why shows dole out tragedies in small doses, or show characters dealing with their grief months or years after their loved one dies. 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. A new series from Parenthood‘s Jason Katims tries to do just that. Does it succeed?
DEAR EDWARD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: We see a shot of clouds and birds, as if we were looking up from ground level. Two brothers are at a beach, and a plane flies low overhead. Suddenly we’re switched to a scene where a plane is about to crash. The scared younger brother looks to his older brother for reassurance.
The Gist: Twelve-year-old Edward Adler (Colin O’Brien), an intelligent kid who is being homeschooled along with his 15-year-old brother Jordan (Maxwell Jenkins), is understandably nervous at their family’s impending move from New York to Los Angeles, where their mother Jane (Robin Tunney) has taken a writing job. 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).
Dee Dee Cameron (Connie Britton) and her daughter Zoe (Audrey Cosa) are celebrating their birthdays — Zoe was born on Dee Dee’s birthday — at a pricey restaurant where Dee Dee and her husband Charles (Ted Koch) were regulars. This is the first time he hasn’t been there, but he’s flying to Los Angeles on business.
Adriana (Anna Uzele) is an aide to her grandmother, a longtime congresswoman. She tries to help the mentally disabled brother of a constituent, but that proves to be futile. Her grandmother wants her to run for her seat when she retires, but as her grandmother gets inside the airport for a flight to Los Angeles, Adriana tells her that she’s going to give notice.
Becks (Khloe Bruno) and her mother, who is raising her daughter by herself, are super close. Her mom, an actress, is going to L.A. to audition for a part; her brother Kojo (Idris Debrand) calls her from Ghana to wish her luck.
Lacey (Taylor Schilling) is still reeling after a third miscarriage. It’s put a strain on her marriage to John (Carter Hudson); he brings up the possibility of adoption once again, but she refuses to hear it, because she wants her own child. She sits in an already-put-together room for the baby, despondent that a child will never happen.
The flight to L.A. encounters turbulence, then loses both engines. 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 plane crashes, and the crash site shows devastation, but there’s one survivor.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The grief aspect of the series reminds us of the Paramount+ weeper When You Least Expect It, but paired up to either Friday Night Lights or Parenthood, both of which were run by Jason Katims, who adapted Ann Napolitano’s 2020 novel Dear Edward for this series. And you can’t really think about plane crash tragedies without thinking of Jeff Bridges’ phenomenal performance in Peter Weir’s 1993 masterpiece, Fearless. Our Take:
So we watched the second episode to see how the dynamic with Edward and the other grieving loved ones would play out. To say that the second episode was depressing was an understatement. But it wasn’t depressing in a way that just showed people mourning or trying to figure out what force in the universe would wrest their loves ones away from them so violently, or even people calling on an investigation of the crash. It was depressing because the bleakness of how everyone moves on was just overwhelming.
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. But the way he points the viewers towards the emotions felt by the characters in Dear Edward feels manipulative, from the foreshadowing used in the first episode — Edward and Jordan playing Rock, Paper, Scissors for the window seat, the congresswoman telling her granddaughter “I’m not dead yet” — to the unrelenting emo alternative folk soundtrack. We were so down by the end of the second episode that we were ready to eat a sleeve of Oreos and take a nap.
Now, we’re hoping that as the season goes on and there are more hopeful events that come out of these tragic events, the greyness will lift a little bit. But we’re not sure if we want to go on that ride with these characters.
For one, just about all of the story beats we’ve seen through the first two episodes are entirely predictable. Second, the characters themselves are unevenly thought out. 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. The rest of the characters feel more like sketches, even by the second episode, than fully-realized characters.
The whole thing just feels maudlin, which is saying a lot given that it’s about the loved ones of plane crash victims. And after the last three years, we don’t think we have it in us to follow these people’s stories.
Sex and Skin: We see Lacey and John finishing up a babymaking session, but that’s about it.
Parting Shot: A rescuer finds Edward, alive and conscious in the wreckage. He says, “I got you,” and reaches out to him. Edward grabs his hand and says, “I’m here,” as if he’s holding on to someone else.
Sleeper Star: Though we’ll only see Robin Tunney in flashbacks after the first episode, we like her empathetic portrayal of Edward’s mother Jane.
Most Pilot-y Line: This actually comes in the second episode when Edward and Jordan, whom Edward still talks to as if he’s still alive, talk about “finding God,” then start doing prayers in Hebrew. The only ones they know, though are ones they’ve heard at seders, namely the blessings of the wine and bread. We then see Lacey overhearing Edward reciting the prayer as if it means anything other than, you know, blessing wine and bread.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Dear Edward has some good performances, but a lot of poorly-sketched characters shuffling their way through an extraordinarily bleak drama.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
