Television tropes are causing real harm and ignore the complexity and choices people face at the end of life.
They create unrealistic expectations that incurable diseases can be cured, false hope that our dying grandmothers won't die. And that has people begging for aggressive, painful treatments that will never work, when they could be focusing on saying goodbye.
Hollywood can do better. Through End Well's annual speakers' conference and a collaboration with entertainment experts at USC Annenberg, Ungerleider is on a mission to influence writers and producers to flip the script on the American way of death.