A Fourth Grader Solves a Murder in ‘Home Before Dark’

The heroine of the Apple TV+ series “Home Before Dark” is an independent, smart, capable and resourceful journalist who puts her investigative skills to use in solving a murder linked to a long-buried cold case with ties to her father’s past. She’s also 9 years old. While this sounds fictional, it’s based on fact. The real-life inspiration is Hilde Lysiak, a crime reporter’s daughter who scooped her town’s newspaper with the story in her self-published newspaper, “Orange Street News.”

Starring Brooklynn Prince (“The Florida Project”), with Jim Sturgess and Abby Miller as her parents, “Home Before Dark” is a cliffhanger-filled mystery families can watch together. Writers/executive producers/showrunners Dara Resnik and Dana Fox were drawn to the inspirational and aspirational themes of female empowerment, social justice, standing up to bullies and fighting for the truth inherent in Hilde’s story, and incorporated them into the fictional mystery they invented.

“We conceived of this in the wake of the 2016 election when all the fake news was going viral. This little girl was shining a light on truth, and that felt incredibly current,” Resnik told the Journal. “Now we’re in a pandemic and you can’t trust half of what you hear at these news conferences. I think it’s incredibly relevant. It’s something that families who are quarantined can watch together and be entertained. Families go through hard times and they try to get through it and make it work. I wanted to make it clear that the world isn’t always fair, and it’s our job to try to make it better.”

“In the world we’re in right now, we’re all so disconnected from each other. [The message is] no matter how uncertain the times are, as a family, you can get through it together,” Fox added. “We shine a light on things we’re all scared about, and also teach parents how to take their kids seriously.”

The father-daughter relationship is the emotional core of the story, which brings the disaffected, disillusioned dad back to journalism to help Hilde solve the case. “I think on a lot of levels, we all kind of want to save our dads,” Fox said.

A native of Rochester, N.Y., Fox grew up loving movies, theater, language and reading, but didn’t pursue creative writing at Stanford University. “The fear of failure and looking stupid and making mistakes frequently holds girls back from taking risks, and it was the case with me,” she said. That changed when she took a screenwriting course at USC Film School.

“My involvement at IKAR started to inform the artistic choices that I was making. I felt this deep sense of obligation that if I was going to put content out into the world, I should be making better choices and make the world a little better than when I started — the tikun olam of it all. I’m incredibly proud of the show because we nudged that needle.” — Dara Resnik

Resnik also landed at USC after studying economics at Tufts. Always interested in film, TV and writing, she tried it herself after reading one bad script after another. “It came organically to me, and the more I look back, I realize it had been calling me the entire time,” she said. “I just wasn’t listening.”

Resnik also realized that her chosen profession made perfect sense for a Jewish woman. As people who always are slightly out of the mainstream, “There’s an observational quality to everything we do,” she said. “And our culture is so steeped in narrative — the Torah itself.” Resnik grew up in Manhattan in a “semi-Conservadox” family, descended from a Russian ultra-Orthodox rabbi on her father’s side and less religious, more assimilated Romanian and Austrian Jews on her mother’s side. “I was steeped in Jewishness, but it was not feminist,” she said. “I wasn’t allowed to read the Torah or open the ark at my bat mitzvah.”

As a “sad, lonely and depressed” college freshman, Resnik literally found her Tribe in the campus Hillel group, chairing the arts committee and forming lasting friendships. Years later, she again turned to Judaism when her marriage to a non-Jew ended. “In the depths of despair, I started synagogue shopping and I found IKAR.”

An active member and on the congregation’s development committee, Resnik calls IKAR’s Rabbi Sharon Brous “my friend and my hero. She inspires me every day to make television that says we can make a difference, and further; that it is incumbent upon all of us to do so. When we see injustice, we must act,” she said. “That is the only way to a better, more just world.”

Following her experiences with films and series that did not particularly reflect her Jewish and feminist values (the collaborative, all-female-made Amazon series “I Love Dick” (2016-17) being an exception), Resnik was happy to work on a show that does. “My involvement at IKAR started to inform the artistic choices that I was making. I felt this deep sense of obligation that if I was going to put content out into the world, I should be making better choices and make the world a little better than when I started — the tikun olam of it all. I’m incredibly proud of the show because we nudged that needle,” she said.

Her dream project is to make a limited series about Ellis Island, incorporating the Jewish immigrant experience. Dana Fox’s “Cruella,” a Cruella de Vil origin story starring Emma Stone, is awaiting release, and other ideas are percolating. “I’d like to find another project that speaks to my heart as much as [“Home Before Dark]  does,” Fox said.

“Home Before Dark” was renewed for a second season months before its April 3 premiere, and most of the scripts and three full episodes were complete before the COVID-19 outbreak forced a production shutdown. Audiences will have to wait longer for a resolution to its surprising ending that provides some resolution but raises new questions. “You’re satisfied because you found out something cool,” Fox said. “But you realize it’s not the end of the mystery, but a beginning of something else.”

“Home Before Dark” is streaming on Apple TV+.