Three days into filming inside Nebraska nursing homes, Peter Murphy Lewis rang the executive who had commissioned him and told her the job had changed. He had been hired to make one 20-minute recruitment film for school career days. “We have 20 minutes from every single day of filming,” he told her, and asked whether it could become a seven-part series instead. She told him she trusted him and to go with it.
That call is where this episode of Creating a New Healthcare starts. Dr Zeev Neuwirth, a physician who spends the show hunting for ideas that humanize healthcare delivery, wanted the making-of story behind People Worth Caring About. What he got instead was a working theory of persuasion: why a long-format story moves an opinion that a staffing statistic never touches, and what has to be true of the story for that to happen.
It matters because most organizations facing a reputation problem reach first for numbers. Lewis had numbers available to him and did not use them. He went looking for the distance between what people who work in long-term care experience every day and what everyone outside it assumes, and he pointed a phone camera at the difference. Our article on business storytelling structure picks up where this conversation leaves off.
Key Takeaways
1. A long-format story opens an opinion; a statistic asks you to defend one
Lewis is explicit about the mechanism he was betting on. “When you introduce stories to misperceptions we have, stories help change our opinion,” he says, and he credits the format as much as the content. “When we listen to somebody long format, we are open to changing our opinion.” A figure invites you to argue with it or to file it. Twenty minutes of watching somebody work does not present itself as an argument at all, so there is nothing to push back against, and the viewer arrives at the conclusion themselves.
2. His evidence for the method was his own life, not audience research
Asked why he trusted this, Lewis does not cite a study. He describes two points where proximity rewrote something he had believed at a distance: a view he had grown up with in Kansas that changed once his college roommate was gay, and a view of people with AIDS that changed once he worked as an HIV/AIDS caseworker straight out of college. “These changed my opinion, and I realized documentaries could as well,” he says. The documentary is an attempt to manufacture that proximity for people who will never get it firsthand.
3. The story sits in the gap between lived experience and public reputation
Lewis had worked as a certified nursing assistant, so he had both readings at once. “My experience of CNAs was fabulous,” he says, while what people outside long-term care said about it was negative. “I knew that contrast could be changed, and that gap was where I was interested.” That is a usable test for anyone deciding what to film. Not the most flattering material available, and not the most urgent problem, but the widest distance between what insiders know and what outsiders assume.
4. Asking the obvious question on camera is the technique, not an amateur tell
Lewis shot the first season on his phone and a Sony camera he says he bought off eBay for around $600, walking through seven nursing homes in first person. The thing he treats as the actual craft is simpler. “If you ask questions, you look stupid, and in the US we try to always look smart, so we ask fewer questions as we get older,” he says. He asks them anyway, because they are the questions the viewer has. “I think that’s the recipe for why this works.”
5. The clearest proof an opinion had moved came from someone who thinks in numbers
After the premiere, Lewis says an investor in a hospice found him and told him he had gone into the business for a financial reason, and that the film had shown him what he did was “financially amazing for humanity.” Lewis, who comes from a banking family, treats that as the signal. “When you can make somebody who thinks of numbers feel that way, I realized that we had a chance to get somewhere bigger.” The second signal was a woman in her seventies who posted that she had watched every episode in one sitting.
6. The people the stories reached were not the people long-term care expects
The audience arrived from an angle nobody had planned for. In the previous month, Lewis says on the episode, around 170,000 people watched parts of the series who had never seen a clip of it before; he puts the split at 66% men, with almost half under 34. “We think long-term care is 50-year-old women taking care of 80-year-old women,” he says. He offers no theory for the