'Neighborhood' welcome: How Marielle Heller persuaded Tom Hanks to portray Fred Rogers
By the time she was 4 years old, Marielle Heller had already rejected "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood." As the eldest of three, she saw her younger siblings watching the PBS show and felt she had grown "too jaded and cynical" for Fred Rogers' brand of cheery positivity.
It wasn't until decades later, when she became a parent herself, that the filmmaker gave Rogers another shot. When her son turned 2, the first television program she and her husband allowed him to watch was "Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood." The animated kids series, which launched in 2012, is produced by Fred Rogers Productions and espouses many of the same values as the original Rogers show - teaching children how to deal with difficult emotions like anger, disappointment and loss.
"It's like the parenting hack of all parenting hacks," Heller said. " It makes you a better parent, I swear to God, because it gives you, like, tips on how to deal with your children. And there's an
