‘Home Before Dark’ on Apple TV+: How ‘13 Reasons Why’ Inspired the Show’s Noir for Families Tone

Apple‘s Home Before Dark follows a precocious nine-year-old reporter who will stop at nothing to uncover the truth about a small town murder. Inspired by the true story of Hilde Lysiak, a pint-sized journalist who scooped a small town paper on a murder investigation, Home Before Dark is part heartwarming family drama, part tetchy crime thriller. And all ten episodes of its first season drop today on Apple TV+.

Home Before Dark follows the Lysko family as they leave their beloved Bed-Stuy to move to patriarch Matt Lysko’s (Jim Sturgess) hometown in the Pacific Northwest. What Matt hasn’t told his family is that he was one of the prime witnesses in a horrific kidnapping and murder case decades ago, and the town still blames him for refusing to testify that the convicted killer did it. A journalist himself, Matt has raised his daughter Hilde (Brooklynn Prince) to follow in his footsteps. And as soon as the family settles into town, Hilde uncovers a murder that threatens to tear the fragile peace in the town apart. Naturally, she runs with the case and publishes her findings, to the horror of her new neighbors.

Decider caught up with Home Before Dark creator Dana Fox and director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, the upcoming In The Heights) over the phone this week to talk about the shift in Apple’s rollout plan for the series, the challenges in making a show starring a nine-year-old girl, and how the success of 13 Reasons Why inspired them to push on. Oh, and we asked Jon M. Chu if there was any chance he and Lin-Manuel Miranda would consider giving the big screen adaptation of In The Heights an in-home release, and Chu explained why that’s a no-go, even in the age of COVID-19.

DECIDER: The first question I have for you guys…Apple changed the rollout for this series, switching from dropping the first three episodes and then going weekly, to dropping the whole shebang. How do you guys feel about that? Do you think it’ll help or hurt its chances to find its audience?

DANA FOX: I mean I was super excited when they told me, because I think that no one — they didn’t really explain their thinking to me in terms of why they did it. But, you know, as a mother of three kids I was like, “Thank you lord, for giving me all 10 episodes!” So I sort of feel like they understood that there are a lot of families, and this show appeals to a pretty wide demographic and a lot of different ages, that people are really starved for content right now, especially stuff that is kind of uplifting. Even as it is binge-y and scary and fun and a cool mystery, it’s ultimately a really warm, good-hearted family show as well. So I think that was part of the decision, I imagine.

And I’m super excited about it, honestly. Because I think that it would’ve been cool to go week-to-week to let it build, but just the way that I watch TV, I’m sort of like a voracious consumer with the shows that I’m watching. I tend to just kind of get really into something and then watch one episode every night. Or two episodes every night and then just kind of go, “Ah, more seasons!” So I’m hopeful that people will do that with this one.

JON M. CHU: Especially right now, that’s what we’re doing. We’re watching it all when we’re all stuck at home. I think this is great for the whole family: kids and parents and everyone can in enjoy it on different levels. 

The next question I have, it’s a very interesting project in that it has a young girl, and yet there’s all these crime and noir elements to it. What drew you guys to this project, and why did you want to make it kind of lean into some of those scarier noir themes?

FOX: I think, for me personally, it just had to deal with my own personal taste. I’m someone who, I want to laugh, I want to cry, I want to feel things. Privately, in my own spare time, I am sort of an obsessive consumer of murder podcasts. Very binge-able stuff.

So I was looking at it from the standpoint of, I grew up watching Spielberg Amblin movies on the couch with my whole family. And I loved them, they were amazing, but there wasn’t a single thing I watched that had a young female heroine at its center. I am now an adult and I have kids, I have a daughter and two sons, and I thought, you know, I think it’s time. I think it’s time that somebody takes a little girl as seriously as I think she should be taken.

And I thought, you know, I don’t know if this is going to work. This is just a strange oddball idea, to combine these tones together. I’ve never watched any kids shows. When I was a kid I didn’t want to watch kid shows, I wanted to watch the adult stuff that I wasn’t allowed to watch. So it never occurred to me to approach this from a “kiddie” perspective. I was watching things like the BBC Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and Broadchurch on the BBC, just these darker things. And I thought, well, maybe there’s a version of this where you just do it that way.

At the time, Joy Gorman, who’s our incredible producer, she had just made 13 Reasons Why and that show hadn’t come out yet, but essentially they used to call it “My So-Called Life meets Serial.” And she said, “Look, you can do this. It seems like the tones won’t make sense, but trust me, you can do this.” So she encouraged me, even when I was feeling a little scared, like, oh god, I’ve never seen anything like this before. I’ve seen four quadrant movies before, but I’ve never seen it done in television. And she just said, “Screw it, let’s just try and do it.” So we did.

There are a lot of kids in this production. Is it challenging to work with the kids in this, not only the tone of the show, but also I understand there’s child labor laws that limit time on set and you have to get things in one take sometimes. Can you talk about what it’s like working with these young actors?

CHU: Well my first day, I understood it intellectually what it meant to be working with these actors. Oh, you get five hours, then they go to school. So you get some time, and then they come out, and they’re going to nail it, and then they go. Uh, we opened with a food fight sequence with like 200 kids. Food, being thrown, at each other’s faces. So we had to limit, take out the hot dogs, just do the buns, just do the grilled cheese, or the mac. It was crazy. And then to realize, “Oh. I need to shoot a scene, in all of this.” Underneath the food smacked to the ground, ketchup flying everywhere. And then there are nine-year-olds that have to perform a scene; we just met. This is our first day. Our crew doesn’t even know what’s going on. It was a lot. But thank god we had Brooklynn Prince and the other young actors. They were fantastic. It is hard. 

And then we realized why there are not a lot of shows where there’s a nine-year-old that is the lead of your show that you shoot the whole thing around. It is difficult. But, as soon as our first week, we got through that. It just is about adjusting to that speed.

I know the real Hilde has been out and proud about loving crime reporting, but did you guys ever consider starting with a more lower-stakes news story for Hilde’s paper? Because you dive right into a murder!

FOX: Well it’s so funny because the murder, the initial murder in the pilot, that part was from real life. That was actually the true part of it, and that’s the story that went viral with that Hilde had moved to her father’s small town after they decided to leave New York because her dad was feeling disillusioned with journalism because of a very difficult case he had been reporting on. And he just was like, “Screw it, I can’t do it anymore. I’m done. I quit.” He quit his job, he moved his family back to his hometown where he grew up, and was like, “We’re homeschooling the kids, we’re not leaving the house, this is what we’re doing.” And Hilde got there and was like, “Yeah, you may have quit being a journalist, but I didn’t. And I’m going to go find stories.” So she got on her bike, she started cruising around town, and two weeks after being there she scooped a local paper on a murder. I thought, “Oh, isn’t that extraordinary. Everybody must have thought that was so amazing.” And it was the exact opposite — everyone in the town hated her and said, “Who do you think you are? Little girls should be having tea parties. Not reporting on murders.”

So all of that stuff actually came from real life, because wherever possible we tried to kind of like, look to the real Hilde to justify what we were doing because a lot of the time we just sort of knew people were going to go, “This is bullshit. This isn’t real. No little girl could do this.” And it’s like, no, this is the real Hilde! Because then people could tell us, “There’s no way this could possibly happen,” and we could just point to it and be like, “It did! Look at it!”

We actually had to pull back on some of the stuff that happened in real life, because it seemed unbelievable. And it’s just because the real Hilde is so incredible.

Jon, I know In the Heights has been pushed back for theatrical release. Is there a scenario where you guys opt for an in-home option, given what’s going on right now?

No. We’ve never had that discussion, and there’s no way Lin[-Manuel Miranda] or I will ever let that happen. This is a movie that needs to be on the big screen, we shot it for the big screen, big giant dance numbers. We want to be together, physically, with everybody, where it’ll all happen. So yeah, that’s where we’re at.

The entire first season of Home Before Dark is now streaming on Apple TV+.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Where to stream Home Before Dark