Edward Hume

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Edward Chalmers Hume (May 18, 1936 – July 13, 2023) was an American screenwriter from Chicago who created and developed several TV series in the 1970s and wrote the influential 1983 TV movie The Day After.

In the 1970s, Hume wrote pilot scripts for four hit series: Cannon (CBS), Barnaby Jones (CBS), The Streets of San Francisco (ABC), and Toma (ABC). During the week of April 21, 1974, all four shows appeared in Nielsen’s top twenty ratings.

The Day After, produced for ABC, focused on ordinary Americans facing a nuclear conflict near missile silos in the Midwest. It became a cultural phenomenon, watched by about 100 million people on its premiere night, and sparked widespread discussion. The film earned Hume an Emmy nomination and a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Drama Anthology. In 2023, he received the Future of Life Award for using storytelling to reduce the risk of nuclear war.

Beyond The Day After, Hume wrote several feature films—Summertree (1971), A Reflection of Fear (1972), and Two-Minute Warning (1976)—and a number of TV movies, including The Harness (1971), Sweet Hostage (1973), and 21 Hours in Munich (1976). He also created HBO’s The Terry Fox Story (1983), which won Canada’s Genie Award for Best Motion Picture, and Common Ground (1990), which won the Humanitas Prize.

Edward Hume died on July 13, 2023, at the age of 87.