This is Ted Health, and I'm your host, Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter. Outside of this podcast, I'm the founder of a

nonprofit called Endwell, and our mission is to make the end of life a part of life, not something we

avoid, something we prepare for, talk about, and then approach with care.

If you've listened to this show for a while, you know this is a topic that I care deeply about.

One of the many interesting things about this topic is that for all our aversion to death,

it's actually everywhere. It's all over pop culture, especially in our

movies and TV shows. But the stories and images we often see aren't always empathetic or even

accurate. And often they obscure, sensationalize, or even dehumanize this very universal experience.

I think that's a problem.

For decades, death on screen has looked very different from death in real life.

In an analysis conducted on U.S. primetime network and streaming TV shows over 2015 and

2016, shooting, stabbing, poison, and beating together made up 49% of depicted TV deaths,

while illness was just 4.3%. In 2023, my organization Endwell published research that we conducted in collaboration with USC's Norman Lear Center, where we explored

what death on television looks like. We looked at more than 140,000 pieces of scripted TV from

2010 to 2020, and we found that words like murder and killing are used up to 82 times more often

than terms like palliative care or advanced directive.

Turns out hospice is rarely shown on TV. And when it is, it's often a backdrop or somebody else's

story. Our research also showed that in TV episodes depicting hospice, patients themselves speak very little.

On average, they account for just 2.7% of the dialogue.

Most are portrayed as passive. Most are white.

Our findings also show that grief is mentioned often, but it's rarely explored in depth.

And this matters because stories shape culture, they shape expectations, they shape whether

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