Dear Edward

Despite its flaws, Dear Edward is a welcome entry into the TV-plane-crash show pantheon as a thoughtful look at the different ways that grief manifests and how community can be healing. Even with some disjointed storytelling, the pieces that land feel like they’re worth the journey.

Nearly every episode has at least one moment that will grab you by the heart, usually right near the end. Fortunately, most of the emotionally resonant moments are legitimately earned, thanks to the sometimes poetic writing and the strong performances from a cast including Connie Britton, Taylor Schilling, Anna Uzele and Idris DeBrand.

Yes, a child shall lead them. Enter “Dear Edward” with caution if such tropes make you gag. But know that there’s plenty here to like, whether or not you’ve had the misfortune of knowing grief on an intimate basis.

“Dear Edward” presents a compelling and charming collection of stories that point to the power of community and connections even after the sky has fallen.

Your enjoyment of Dear Edward will likely hinge on your ability to embrace its oft-treacly trappings and its humanist spirit, aspects that characterize its greatest strengths as well as its corniest missteps.

Dear Edward is imperfect yet ultimately compelling — a quietly ambitious study of grief and connection. It’s refreshingly unflashy, focused on its characters and the emotional thread that links them together.

Crucially, both actors [Connie Britton and Taylor Schilling] invest their characters with some much-needed animation and individuality, modulating the programme’s otherwise monotonous tone of grief, grief and yet more unimaginable grief. ... But there are many underwritten and uninvolving other characters whose scenes will have you counting the minutes till you can be back in Dee Dee’s New Jersey mansion, drinking wine and talking trash about her dead husband.

Finding drama and resilience in the seeds of tragedy, Dear Edward is a sensitively done series that never fully recovers from its challenging premise . . . Intended to be uplifting, the Apple TV+ show is too much of a bummer to wholly recommend boarding this flight.

If you’re in need of a good cry, “Dear Edward’s” overcast vision of life will likely do the trick. But even with Britton leading the charge, I’m not sure her latest was meant for more than five episodes, let alone the 10 it got.

The subplots are uneven: some compelling — Anna Uzele is especially good as a politician's idealistic granddaughter — some underdeveloped. [13 - 26 Feb 2023, p.6]

A crushingly earnest melodrama. Despite many capable performances, few characters get enough screen time to evolve into more than stock types with generic problems. The sole exception, until its pat conclusion, is the story of the precocious, anxious, angry, erratic Edward.

A well-intentioned slog.

The first season of Dear Edward feels like 10 hours of 10 (or more) people crying at each other nonstop. There’s no room for anything to echo because the cacophony of misery is so loud and so pervasive. Dear Edward is made with enough craft and driven by enough solid performances that it doesn’t usually feel like straight-up misery porn.

Dear Edward has some good performances, but a lot of poorly-sketched characters shuffling their way through an extraordinarily bleak drama.