Noah Wyle

I really can't answer that for you.

This is your father.

That's your decision to make.

I can guarantee you that we will keep him as comfortable as possible if a natural death is what you choose.

What my sister means is that we're still deciding the best thing to do.

Well, the sooner you decide, the better.

I'm really sorry.

I wish there was more that I could do.

I'm not sure that he has that much time left.

Well, first of all, it's really gratifying to be able to play a storyline over several episodes so that you can watch the gradation of acceptance and watch the different methods and strategies that practitioners use to help families prepare.

And sometimes when you only have an hour to tell a story that has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, that feels like extremely hurried work and oftentimes feels disingenuous or inauthentic to the process.

So when you can have these things kind of arc over several hours,

it feels like you can walk through those five stages of grief with these characters.

When we prepare for them, there's a lot of conversation about tone and about specificity of point of view.

In this particular instance, we have a brother and a sister who have very different reasons

for wanting to keep their father alive, that have an emotional core to them that gets revealed in subsequent episodes.

So you want everybody in these scenes to have a real point of view that's legitimate to who they are.

And then when those three truths come out and they are in conflict with each other, as they often are, that makes for good drama.

This is the five-year anniversary of him taking his mentor off life support, which during the height of COVID, you know, he had to be put on.

And then ultimately in our backstory, he had to be taken off the life support to give it to another patient who had a better chance of survival.