Any of these dreamboats could walk into a modelling contract at a moment’s notice. Perhaps these generic grievers would be more memorable if they looked more distinctive? Dear Edward is dutifully diverse in racial terms but has been cast from the same pool of uniformly slim, symmetrical people as most US network television, with the effect of undermining its otherwise sincere efforts to depict the reality of life’s struggles.
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. British actor Idris DeBrand charms as Uncle Kojo, the self-described “Portaloo prince of Ghana”. Crucially, both actors 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. Britton is Dee Dee, an upfront, often tipsy, emotionally raw housewife, while Schilling is Edward’s aunt turned adoptive mum Lacey, a woman whose marriage and mental health were already on the brink before this huge new responsibility landed in her lap.
#The plane effect rating tv#
Some of them you can’t help but care for, including two played by already established, always engaging TV stars, Connie Britton (Nashville, American Horror Story, Friday Night Lights) and Taylor Schilling (Orange Is the New Black). Fortunately, the drama is evenly shared between the eight core members of a bereavement support group. That’s far too much to put on any one person, least of all a child. At the centre of the ensemble is Edward, a curly-haired, sickly-looking piano prodigy (Colin O’Brien) who is traumatised first by the crash (unsparingly played out in the first episode) and then by a deluge of attention from strangers who unburden themselves both in writing – the “Dear Edward” letters of the title – and in person.
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