Three or four years ago, at a trade show in Nebraska, Peter Murphy Lewis introduced himself to the man who ran the foundation of the state health care association and made an unsolicited pitch. “Why don’t we do a documentary about the caregivers of Nebraska?” The answer was that it sounded interesting, and to say more. Lewis had spent about a decade making television in South America, including a show he likens to Dirty Jobs in which he says he worked 125 different jobs, and he wanted to point that format at nursing homes.
On Autumn Is Here, host Francine Crawford sets out to ask how the film came about. The conversation lands somewhere more useful than an origin story: what an organization actually does with a documentary once it exists. The brief was a staffing film for a single state. What Nebraska ended up holding was a piece of footage its members now cut up for advocacy meetings, fundraising, event promotion and virtual tours for prospective residents.
That gap between what a video was funded to do and what it turns out to be good for is the real subject here. Lewis is unusually specific about it, partly because none of the extra uses were planned and none of them needed another day of filming. Anyone who has ever signed off a video budget on one justification will recognize what he describes. There is a written companion to this episode in our article on where documentary films actually land.
Key Takeaways
1. The brief was a staffing film and the asset ended up doing several other jobs
Lewis is candid that the ambition started small. “Our goal at the beginning was to have some type of visual marketing asset that Nebraska could use to attract younger generation to combat the staffing crisis in long-term care,” he says. “Really quickly we realized that it was going to do more than staffing.” He lists what followed: showing it to politicians, using it for fundraising, using it to lift attendance, and using it for marketing. None of that sat in the original justification, and none of it required new footage.
2. Communities that were never filmed use the clips as virtual tours
The reuse Lewis singles out is the one nobody scoped. Members of the association who do not appear in the series take clips of it and, in his words, “show as virtual tours to prospective clients and residents before they come in,” as a way of showing how much life there is in a building. A recruitment film had quietly become a sales asset for a different audience. That is a decent argument for releasing footage to a whole membership rather than only to the buildings that appear in it.
3. The decision to go long was made two days into filming, not in the brief
The plan was a 20-minute short for YouTube. Two days into shooting, Lewis rang the association’s chief executive and told her “the quality of this is insane,” then asked whether they could move from one video to a seven-part series with 20-minute episodes. She agreed. A friend from his television years later took the finished series out to streaming platforms, and he says that is how it reached “every single smart television in the United States” about six weeks before this recording.
4. Caregiver was defined by who chooses to be there, not by job title
Asked whether the series follows caregivers in the usual sense, Lewis widens the term straight away. “These might be maintenance, these might be kitchen aids, these might be nurses,” he says, alongside registered nurses, directors of nursing, administrators, volunteers and salon staff. His working test is whether somebody “makes a choice to be there” around seniors. He is equally firm about what the job is not. Some CNAs tell him “I’m just a CNA,” and he calls them “architects of another stage of life” and “designers of memories” instead.
5. The return showed up as changed language, not as a filled vacancy
The two reactions Lewis reaches for are not recruitment figures. He says an investor in one of the hospice buildings found him after the Nebraska premiere and told him the film had given him “a completely different appreciation for the investment that I’ve done,” and that it now mattered “so much more than just financially.” A woman called Rosalie posted about a month after watching that the series “has completely changed my perspective and opinion of long-term care,” and that she would feel honored to live in one.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Q: How did the documentary come about?
A: Lewis met the head of the Nebraska association’s foundation at a trade show and pitched a caregiver series built on the format of the South American television show he had hosted for around ten years. He was told to say more, and then they went ahead.
Q: What got you interested in caregivers in the first place?
A: A marketing job at an electronic health records company in 2020, and a podcast he started there. A guest told him executives were the wrong people to interview and that he should talk to his CNAs. His chief executive told him to train as one, so he did.
Q: What should everyone else see about this work?
A: Two things. That the work is not simply changing beds and bathing people, and that it is unusually rewarding. He says caregivers earn a few dollars less than nearby restaurant and retail jobs while on their feet all day, under-appreciated, and blamed for things outside the building.
Q: Where can people watch it?
A: On Roku, Amazon, Apple TV, Hulu and Samsung TV, and on YouTube. He says three seasons are filmed with two more coming, which would make five, and that the later seasons will be submitted to Netflix.
Q: Has making this changed you personally?
A: He says it has. His parents retired to about eight blocks away and he sees them most days of the week. He credits caregivers with teaching him patience and, borrowing from his favorite book on love languages, says the work has made him a better father.
What This Means for Trade Associations Commissioning Video
If you are funding a film on a single justification, budget for the other uses before you shoot. Nebraska paid for a recruitment asset and ended up with material for advocacy, fundraising, event promotion and member marketing. Those uses arrived after the fact, which means nobody had decided in advance how the footage would be cut, cleared or shared. Deciding up front that it will be sliced several ways costs nothing and saves an awkward retrofit.
Then make the material available to members who were not in it. The virtual tour use is the clearest example of value the commissioner never paid for and never had to produce. It works because the footage documents ordinary days rather than a specific building, which is what makes the People Worth Caring About docuseries reusable across an entire state rather than only by the homes that appear in it.
Treat the initial running time as a hypothesis. The seven-part decision came from what the camera was finding on day two, not from the brief, and it needed a commissioner willing to take the call. Build that flexibility into the production plan rather than the edit, which is how Strategic Pete’s documentary video production services approach a shoot that might turn out to be a series.
Finally, take the ask seriously. Lewis closes by suggesting listeners send one episode to a 15 or 17 year old, or to a single mother juggling two jobs, and tell that person they have the capacity for this work. He points out that almost every director of nursing and administrator he met had started as a CNA in high school or college. He tallies 63 caregiver stories across three seasons on the episode and says he has moved from neutral to extremely optimistic: “I see this as being turned into a movement.”
Listen to the Full Episode
This conversation is episode 148 of Autumn Is Here, hosted by Francine Crawford, published on 14 September 2025 with Peter Murphy Lewis. Listen to the full episode on Spotify.
