Streaming Series ‘Going Home’ Explores Death’s Door

From left to right: Steve Lloyd as Scott, Aviona Rodriguez Brown as Tamara, Cynthia Geary as Charley, and Cozi Zuehlsdorf as Janey. Courtesy of Affirm Films

Before Cynthia Geary was cast as the star of the new streaming series Going Home, she didn’t think much about death. But now that she’s playing a hospice nurse, Ms. Geary’s life revolves around it.

“I really hadn’t experienced a lot of death in my family,” she said. “My mom is 92 years old and my dad passed away at 92 just recently. I had never even been to a hospice facility.”

The second season of Going Home is currently streaming on Great American Pure Flix.

Going Home is the number one series on the faith-based platform. Other series streaming on Pure Flix include “Vindication,” “Eleanor’s Bench,” “Prayer Box,” “The Encounter,” and “The Power Couple.”

Ms. Geary’s character, Charley Copeland, is the head nurse at a fictitious hospice facility called Sunset House where she treats patients who are waiting for the inevitable death they’ve been admitted to face.

For research purposes, Ms. Geary was introduced to nurses at Hospice of Spokane in Washington state where she learned many hospice workers view their job as a calling.

“The show changed me,” she told The Epoch Times. “Death isn’t so scary. I think people avoid talking about it because we’re afraid of it.”

The Rise of Hospice Care

Hospice care, which typically requires having less than 12 months to live and being afflicted with a terminal illness, is on the rise nationwide.

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) Medicare estimates that spending on hospice increased from $12.9 billion to $22.4 billion between 2010 to 2020 and hospice care providers rose from 3,498 in 2010 to 5,058 in 2020.

“One of the things we try to do as hospice nurses in this show is give people a place to heal and forgive before they transition and if they need to give forgiveness or get forgiveness from a loved one, this is the time and the space to do that,” Ms. Geary said.

If Ms. Geary looks familiar, it’s because she was a series regular on the CBS television series “Northern Exposure,” a show about a big city doctor adjusting to small town life in Alaska.

She appeared in 110 episodes as Shelly Marie Tambo from 1990 to 1995.

Going Home is different because she’s carrying the show.

“It’s just a really big role with a ton of dialogue and we shoot ten pages a day fast so I need to do my homework every night and come in with those lines down as the lead of the show,” she said.

Ms. Geary is also a producer on Going Home, which enables her to sit in on editing sessions and offer feedback.

Greenlit During COVID

Due to the pandemic, death and dying have been in the national zeitgeist since 2020, which show creator Dan Merchant believes helped him sell the concept.

In 2021, alone, there were 460,000 COVID-associated deaths in the U.S., according to CDC data.

“COVID forced us to confront death and it caused a lot of existential contemplation that everybody went through during the lockdowns,” Mr. Merchant told The Epoch Times.

He credits Affirm Films executive vice president Rich Peluso for greenlighting the series. Affirm Films is a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment specializing in the development of faith-based and inspirational productions. Going Home is an Affirm Original.

Mr. Merchant works on episodes in the writing room with a novelist-turned-tv-writer named Matt Mikalatos and his wife Kara Merchant.

“We’re talking about the human experiences where every death is different, just like every life is different so the stories we can tell are a bit endless,” Mr. Merchant said.

Episode one, for example, was about a 35-year-old football player who abused painkillers so he could prolong his career, which ended up costing him his internal organs because he couldn’t get on an organ donor list.

Death Doesn’t Discriminate

Because death doesn’t discriminate based on race, ethnicity, gender, or age, the show aims to appeal to varying demographics.

“There are even just random 23-year-olds who die on the sports field and even younger people dying of fentanyl poisoning,” actress Aviona Rodriguez Brown told The Epoch Times. “Those are scary things that people don’t think about. A lot of the younger generation is shaking awake to this idea that maybe they won’t make it to 35 years old.”

Ms. Brown portrays “Tamara,” one of the hospice staffers who work with Ms. Geary on the Spokane, Washington set.

Adding to the universal drama of death that’s central to the show is the fact that the main characters are grappling with personal issues, such as young love, aging parents—or in Ms. Brown’s case—her character Tamara is dependent on insulin to treat diabetes.

Tamara’s underlying story plot hit close to home because Ms. Brown’s mother, in real life, struggles with stage 4 diabetes.

“I was going to acting school in New York in 2016 and working in Off-Broadway productions when I had to come home to Seattle because my mother’s illness became too much for her,” Ms. Brown told The Epoch Times.

A Personal Story With a Story

The idea for Going Home occurred to Mr. Merchant after his mother died in hospice.

He wondered how it was that the hospice nurses around his mother seemed to know exactly what to say in those last days. “When we started researching with the hospice nurses, they said they are really intentional about being present and it explained a lot to me about the positive experience I'd had in hospice with my relatives,” Mr. Merchant said.

Mr. Merchant is known for directing ten episodes of Z-Nation, a TV series that aired on the SyFy Channel about a team of average Joe heroes who must transport the only known survivor of a zombie virus from New York to California where the last functioning viral lab awaits his blood.

The difference with the Going Home series is that Mr. Merchant is the sole showrunner.

“There’s more responsibility on my shoulders, but we have such a great team so it’s a matter of leading and making good decisions, which I do enjoy,” he added.