‘Dear Edward’ has ties to ‘Friday Night Lights’
In his initial conversation with Ann Napolitano about adapting her 2020 novel, “Dear Edward,” for television, Jason Katims made clear that among the changes he would need to make would be the creation of additional characters to help tell an ongoing story.
Of course, as the show debuts Friday, Feb. 3, on Apple TV+, the titular character remains young Edward Adler, a brilliant homeschooled boy who also is a piano prodigy. Portrayed by 13-year-old Colin O’brien, Edward is the lone survivor of a plane crash who is faced with a great deal of change very quickly and, understandably, struggles with all of it.
Other characters deeply affected by the crash lost loved ones who, like Edward’s parents and big brother, were on the flight.
One of the people invented for the series is Dee Dee Cameron, whose husband — and the father of her college-aged daughter — was among those killed. It’s more complicated than that, however, as shocking facts about the man’s life are revealed to her. As a result, over the 10 episodes of the season, Dee Dee must begin to chart a drastically new course for herself.
“I love this character of Dee Dee so much,” Katims says during a recent roundtable video interview. “She made me smile.”
She also made him think of an old friend, Connie Britton. The two worked together on the television version of “Friday Night Lights,” where Katims served as an executive producer and head writer and Britton portrayed Tami Taylor, the charming and supportive but also very strongwilled wife of high school football coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler).
“When I thought of Connie playing Dee Dee ... I couldn’t think of anybody else in the world,” he says. “And it was an incredible experience working with her on it.”
And Britton was sure — well kinda, sorta, probably — that it would be.
“I was so happy to hear from him, and then I was like, ‘Well, I mean, it’s probably going to be like it was back then,’ ” she says during a separate video interview. “But I don’t know, we’ll see.”
She says they helped to create a wonderful working environment on “Friday Night Lights,” which ran for five seasons.
“Back in those days,” she says, “it was like, ‘Oh, this is how we want a show to be,’ so it was really fun to reunite with him and feel that again.”
On “Dear Edward,” Katims says, the two worked closely to develop Dee Dee.
“We had a lot of time before we started shooting, talking through the episodes, the scenes, (about) who this woman was,” he says.
Says Britton, “He had a general idea of who he wanted her to be, but then we were really able to talk through (it).
“Every role that I ever play,” continues Britton, whose TV credits also include “Nashville,” “American Horror Story” and the first season of “White Lotus,” with numerous movies on her resume, as well, “I want to make sure that there’s some kind of universal theme.
Again, she is one of many characters viewers will get to know, mainly via meetings of an airline-funded grief group attended by several of the folks who lost someone in the crash.
Among the most compelling is Adriana Washington (Anna Uzele), an aide to a longtime U.S. congresswoman serving a district in New York City — who also happens to be Adriana’s grandmother. When the political icon dies in the crash, Adriana decides to run for her seat, but her ambitions are complicated when she grows close to Kojo (Idris Debrand), whose sister perished and who plans to take his young niece, Becks (Khloe Bruno), back to his native Ghana.
Then there’s Lacey Curtis (Taylor Schilling of “Orange Is the New Black”), who has had trouble having a child with her husband, John (Carter Hudson), which has caused great stress in the marriage. Suddenly, they are caring for Edward, who, as you would expect, is struggling greatly to adapt to so much change so quickly, despite making a friend in his neighbor Shay (Eva Ariel Binder), who has a much larger personality than he does.
Juggling myriad characters is nothing new for Katims. “Friday Night Lights” featured a large ensemble, as did a subsequent NBC series he created, “Parenthood.”
“He’s very adept at finding the ways that very diverse characters can overlap and still remain very specific individual humans,” Britton says. “Jason, I think, in an ensemble environment, is just masterful.”