Showrunner Dara Resnik Discusses ‘Home Before Dark’ and the Importance of Truth

One of Apple TV+’s new offerings is the elevated family viewing show entitled Home Before Dark. The 10-episode first season tells the story of Hilde Lisko, who moves from Brooklyn to a small town where her investigative reporting skills quickly become both an asset and a hindrance to her fitting in. 

Co-creator, executive producer, showrunner, and writer Dara Resnik spoke with us about adapting the life of a nine-year-old journalist for television, and how it felt to be in control of her own production. 

Resnik is a veteran television writer who has been on the staff of shows such as Daredevil, Castle, and Jane the Virgin. After so many years of writing on staff, Resnik felt well-equipped to take on the role. 

“Obviously I felt like I was ready for this. One of the things I thought about a lot when I was first offered the opportunity to create and run this show is that I felt like I was training for over a decade in television for it, and each show that I worked on with their desperate tones and desperate showrunners leant something to what became Home Before Dark,” said Resnik.

There were many elements from the various shows that Dara has worked on over the years that have influenced parts of Home Before Dark.

The snappy dialogue was influenced by her work on Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60, the whimsical sort of off-beat crime reporter element came from Pushing Daisies, the feminism of I Love Dick can be seen in the relationships Hilde develops with a female officer, and the procedural elements of Castle also have a prominent tone.

Resnik also said that her experience co-creating, executive producing, and writing Home Before Dark felt a lot like being on staff as well. The process was collaborative with the executive producing work being shared between several others including Dana Fox, Jon M. Chu, and Joy Gorman Wettels.  

“All of that teamwork, that I had learned over many years of working in the trenches on various staffs of television shows and on various sets, I think served me very well as a showrunner. I don’t believe that my idea is always the best idea. I believe that great ideas come from all kinds of places and that your job as a showrunner is to pick the best idea,” said Resnik. 

Home Before Dark is a unique take on a crime drama because it relies on the perspective of a nine-year-old narrator. 

“Joy Gorman [Wettels] has such an incredible eye for material. She also optioned 13 Reasons Why and made that into an amazing TV series. She came to Dana and me with the idea of an elevated family viewing show,” said Resnik. 

“All three of us, Joy, Dana, and I, all had young kids and were subjected to watching so many things that we didn’t want to watch. We wanted something that spoke to humans of all ages as well as it spoke to us,” said Resnik. 

Resnik grew up in the age of Amblin productions such as E.T. and Indiana Jones. One of the aspects of Home Before Dark that excited her was the chance to put a little girl at the center of a story and give her some magic.

“The thought of instead of the magic being Eliot is alone and he befriends an alien, what if the magic is that a little girl is the protagonist, we keep the Amblin tone, but the magic is that she can truly affect her world,” said Resnik. 

Home Before Dark‘s main characters draws inspiration from the real-life experience of nine-year-old Hilde Lysiak. Now thirteen, Lysiak ran The Orange Street News, a local newspaper in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania from 2014 to 2019, and in Patagonia, Arizona since 2019. She is currently the youngest member of the Society of Professional Journalists. 

While Lysiak was the impetus for the series, Resnik was also inspired by the other young activists that have taken center stage such as Greta Thurnberg, the Parkland kids, and Malala. Combining their activism with Hilde’s focus on local news has made for a timely series that may stand the test of time and resonate now more than ever. 

“It was timely when we first conceived of it in 2017, [when] the term fake news was basically going viral,” said Resnik. “That was one of the things that was so beautiful about the real Hilde, was that she really woke her own father out of his own disillusionment, about the news media.”

“He really was feeling like everything had become clickbait, and his own daughter scooping this murder, in his hometown really brought him out of that depression and reminded him that there is such a thing as truth in journalism, and there is such a thing as a fact” continued Resnik. 

“It’s crazy to me that now here we are in the middle of a pandemic where everybody is constantly questioning what’s the truth, and the role of our news media is more important than ever.” 

While the Liskos are a fictionalized version of the Lysiaks, their interactions are wholly based on the family. Resnik said that the most important thing to the creative team was staying true to the emotional core of the relationships. 

“Anytime that we would veer off in storyland, into a piece of story that was not based on real-life but was inspired by it, we’d ask ourselves, ‘What would Hilde really do?’ or ‘What did Hilde really do?'” Resnik explained. 

Hilde Lysiak and her parents Matt and Brigit were consultants on the show who were very generous in helping the Resnik, Fox, and the rest of the creative team make sure everything felt authentic from the food Hilde took with her on a stakeout to the investigative journalism terms used in conversation. 

“They were so generous with opening up their lives and opening up their trove of knowledge to us that it made it easy to stay true to who they were while at the same time creating something that was wholly original,” explained Resnik. 

Beyond the story itself, Resnik also hopes that the way the Liskos interact will serve as a template to help families have difficult conversations and not be afraid to share the truth with their children. 

“I’m the single mother of an eight-year-old, and when people ask me, ‘What are you telling your daughter about the pandemic?’ I say I’m telling her the truth. I explain what a virus is, and I explain that it goes from person to person, and I explain that we don’t know how long this is gonna last, and I talk about my feelings,” explained Resnik. 

When it came to casting, all of the executive producers were involved in finding the five actors who would make up the Lisko family. Wettels immediately wanted to cast Brooklyn Prince from The Florida Project as Hildle.

“Even though I have a child, sometimes you forget that children age. I loved The Florida Project, she was incredible, but I immediately thought this girl was a little too young to be our Hilde,” said Resnik. 

Wettels was persistent and they sent the material to Prince anyway, who fell in love with the material. 

Prince and her father auditioned under the direction of Chu, and Resnik was sold by the chemistry in a scene where Hilde was bantering with her father. After seeing the tape, Resnik said that the decision to cast Prince was a no-brainer. 

“There was so much that was so similar to how the real Hilde is with her own father. The thing that both of them share is that their parents treat them like peers. It’s really remarkable it’s something I wish more parents could do, is to see their child as a whole human.” said Resnik.

When it came to casting the father Resnik said that one of the most important things was finding a Hollywood actor who was egoless enough and confident enough to share the screen with a talented nine-year-old actor. That led them to Jim Sturgess. 

“Jim flew in from London, and immediately came into a room with Brooklyn for a chemistry read. They hit it off so fast. Weirdly, she looks more like Jim Sturgess than she even looks like her own father. It was bizarre,” remembered Resnik. 

Abby Miller was cast as Bridget on a day that Resnik was running the writers’ room. Fox advocated for Miller’s audition that day and showed Resnik Miller’s audition tape. 

“Abby was the only actress who auditioned who truly understood what a deep and complex Bridget really was, and brought such a depth and strength to her,” recalled Resnik.

Then came the two sisters. Kylie Rogers, who plays Izzy, originally auditioned to play Hilde, but they knew she was too old. The hardest one to cast, was the youngest sister, Ginny. 

“We looked and looked and looked for a tiny addition for this family, and literally, maybe a day or two before we started shooting, we saw this audition tape of this sweet little girl with all of this spunk, whose mother immigrated to Canada, actually, and they were just so lovely and grounded, and suddenly we saw our five Liskos on screen and thought, ‘Oh my god, they look like a family. It was remarkable,'” recalled Resnik. 

Home Before Dark is one of several Apple TV+ series to be renewed ahead of its first season premiere. Production for the second season has already started but has been halted due to coronavirus and the current pandemic, which Resnik agrees was the right decision. 

“We will continue to shoot that once we can,” said Resnik. “We’re excited to show the world where the Liskos go next. The first season makes it clear that this is a story that has no end.”

“The real Hilde has been to so many incredible places, and her entire life is so extraordinary, so you keep drawing from that emotional truth, and her true story to an extent, the amount of inspiration for the places where this family and Hilde and go is endless.”

Resnik also has a few other projects in the works in addition to Home Before Dark Season 2. The show has already opened doors for her to work on other pilots and other shows careerwise.

“One of the things I’m really proud is that I’ve worked on a lot of different kinds of shows, while I absolutely love Home Before Dark, I’m excited that this has opened up doors for me to get into other genres and new worlds that I wouldn’t have been able to create otherwise.” 

During the pandemic, Resnik has been introducing her daughter to a lot of 80s and 90s classics such as Three Men and a Baby, Mrs. Doutfire, and Sister Act. She’s also been watching a lot of documentaries and the Netflix limited series called Unorthodox. 

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Home Before Dark Season 1 is now streaming on Apple TV+

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