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 skew beyond the material itself: something in these stories is landing with an audience the sector has never spoken to.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Q: What’s your background, and how did you become a documentary maker?
A: Lewis says he was a numbers guy who studied humanities, hosted a television show in South America for about a decade that he compares to Dirty Jobs, then trained as a certified nursing assistant. At a state convention he pitched the association on filming frontline caregivers, and they said yes.
Q: What did you actually film?
A: Seven nursing homes, chosen by his director from a list of about twenty the Nebraska association provided. He shot in first person on a phone and a second-hand camera. “You watch me walk around with the cell phone just like you would film if you were following your kids,” he says.
Q: What do you want viewers to walk away with?
A: That caregiving does not require a job title. He points to his father, who visited his grandparents almost daily during dementia and Alzheimer’s, and to the CNAs he calls “architects of memories.” Anyone can start today without transferring a single patient.
Q: What surprised you, even knowing the work?
A: That caregivers take more out of the job than they put in. “Nobody’s doing it in there for the pay,” he says, noting the wage sits below much of retail for harder, more thankless work, and that what CNAs carry home is not available anywhere else.
Q: Who do you hope watches, and what should they do with it?
A: Educators and policy makers near education. He wants one episode shown in a high school, and says he will join the screening over Zoom. He has told partner states to cut the footage up however suits them; he is not protective of it.
What This Means for Communicators Facing a Perception Problem
If your sector is losing an argument about itself, check whether you are actually in an argument. Lewis’s starting point was that roughly half the population held a neutral or negative view of long-term care, and none of that half was waiting for a better statistic. He did not try to correct them. He gave them twenty minutes of somebody else’s ordinary day and let the correction happen without being asked for.
The practical test he offers is the gap test. Before you brief anything, find the widest distance between what people inside the work know and what people outside it assume, and film there. That is a different instruction from “tell our story,” because it tells you which story, and it tells you when to stop looking. The People Worth Caring About docuseries is what that test produced when it was applied to frontline caregiving.
The production lesson is that the gap does not need a crew to close. First season, phone camera, one second-hand body, seven buildings, and a host willing to ask the question everyone in the room already has. Polish was not the variable. Access and curiosity were, which is why Strategic Pete’s documentary storytelling practice is built around getting into the room rather than around the kit list.
Finally, measure the right thing. Recruitment was the brief, and recruitment is a lagging number. The signals Lewis actually watched were an investor reframing his own business, a stranger in her seventies saying she would be honored to live in a facility, and nursing schools folding the episodes into their curriculum. If you are trying to shift a perception, look for people describing the thing differently before you look at the funnel.
Listen to the Full Episode
This conversation is episode 212 of Creating a New Healthcare, hosted by Dr Zeev Neuwirth, published on 17 December 2025 with Peter Murphy Lewis, host of People Worth Caring About. Listen to the full episode on creatinganewhealthcare.com.
