Edward Hume, ‘The Day After’ Writer dies at 87

Edward Hume, legendary Television writer, has died at the age of 87.

The writer was nominated for an Emmy for the astonishingly realistic, widely viewed nuclear holocaust thriller The Day After from 1983. He also produced or developed such 1970s episodic crime classics as The Streets of San Francisco, Cannon, and Barnaby Jones.

His family published an obituary this week stating that Hume passed away on July 13th. No cause of death was revealed.

After receiving his first television credit in 1967 (for an episode of The Fugitive), Hume went on to create such enjoyed detective and cop fare as Toma (1973), Cannon (1971–76), The Streets of San Francisco (1972–77), starring Karl Malden and a young Michael Douglas, and Barnaby Jones (1973–80), starring a post–Beverly Hillbillies Buddy Ebsen as an elderly private eye who emerges from retirement after his son is murdered.

Although Hume wrote numerous TV movies in the 1970s and 1980s, including The Terry Fox Story (1983) and John And Yoko: A Love Story (1985), The Day After, a nuclear war drama that aired on ABC on November 20, 1983, is by far his most well-known work.

In the United States, the movie attracted more than 100 million spectators and became a cultural landmark.

Hume was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Limited Series or a Special for the movie.

Ten different Emmys were nominated for The Day After; two of them (for sound editing and special visual effects) were awarded.

Children Chris, Brian, and Erika, sisters Marian Tibbetts and Martha Lucius, as well as other close relatives, are the family Hume left behind.