Created by Jason Katims (‘Parenthood’), ‘Dear Edward’ is an Apple TV+ drama sequence. The story revolves spherical a variety of characters experiencing shared grief when their members of the family perish in a airplane crash. The eponymous character (Colin O’Brien), a 12-year-old boy from Manhattan, New York, is the one actual survivor of the crash that killed his family and all the other people on the airplane. Now he ought to navigate by the use of his grief whereas dealing with the non secular fervor of the people who regard his survival a miracle.
Equipped with a stellar ensemble stable, ‘Dear Edward’ delivers a poignant and somber journey by the use of a myriad of emotions. Plane crashes are unusual, nonetheless they do happen, and if that has made you ponder whether or not ‘Dear Edward’ relies on exact events, we obtained you lined.
Is Dear Edward a True Story?
Yes, ‘Dear Edward’ relies on a actual story, not lower than partially. While Edward and completely different characters inside the current are fictional, the core narrative is developed from precise events. Katims created ‘Dear Edward’ from the 2020 namesake novel by Ann Napolitano, who drew inspiration from the crash of Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771 on May 12, 2010. There have been 104 passengers and crew members on board the airplane on the time. Only one among them, a 9-year-old Dutch boy named Ruben van Assouw, survived the incident.
Like Edward inside the current, Ruben misplaced his older brother and parents inside the crash. The family was returning to the Netherlands from a journey in South Africa when the tragedy occurred. Rescue teams discovered Ruben nonetheless strapped into his seat inside the wreckage of Flight 771, which took off from Johannesburg, South Africa, and exploded whereas landing at Tripoli, Libya.
Ruben’s uncle and aunt, Jeroen van der Sande and Ingrid van Assouw, respectively, bought right here to Libya as rapidly as doable. According to the Associated Press, they knowledgeable Ruben the truth about what occurred a few days later. By May 15, Ruben was once more inside the Netherlands. In an interview with Library Journal, Napolitano mirrored on why Ruben’s story drew her consideration.
“I think I couldn’t let go because I was both deeply worried about Ruben and deeply curious about how he could go on after such a terrible tragedy,” the American author talked about. “His aunt and uncle did an amazing job of protecting Ruben’s privacy once he was released from the hospital, but that meant I couldn’t know that he became okay. I had to create a set of circumstances under which a little boy in that situation could believably become a whole person, in spite of—or even because of—what he’d lost. I needed him to be okay, so I had to write my way into believing that was possible.”
In her e ebook, Napolitano used Maslow’s hierarchy to building Edward’s restoration course of. “I struggled for years to find shape, or a believable arc, to Edward’s storyline,” she outlined in an interview with Authorlink. “I had to walk such a careful emotional line, that at times I found it paralyzing [for me as the writer, and for Edward]. I think my husband had the idea to align his growth to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and that through-line made real sense to me. Maslow portrayed the hierarchy as a triangle, with physical survival being the wide bottom of the triangle—deeply necessary to us as humans—and the thin point on top being self-actualization.”
After learning Napolitano’s e ebook, Katims thought that it had the potential to be a sturdy and shifting TV sequence. “And I just sort of fell in love with it. What I was interested in telling was this story about resilience, a story about people coming back from something that was very hard,” he knowledgeable the EW.
Several characters in ‘Dear Edward’ are created by Katims, along with Dee Dee, portrayed by Connie Britton, who reunites with Katims for the first time since their collaboration in ‘Friday Night Lights.’ “I always wanted to work with Jason again, but it’s almost like you have to let time pass. You have to get to that right moment. I was so excited to hear from [him],” Britton knowledgeable Deadline.
As a current, ‘Dear Edward’ affords a candid take a take a look at grief and resilience. “It’s not afraid to talk about grief, which is a wonderful thing,” Katims outlined to EW. “But there’s also so much life in it and love and romance and all the things that I’d like to see when I’m watching shows.” So, to sum all of it up, ‘Dear Edward’ has positive factors that it attracts from precise life, nonetheless that doesn’t suggest it’s fully devoid of any fictional elements.
