On TelevisionThe Netflix Show That Airs from the Great BeyondGloria Steinem on “Famous Last Words,” filmed in February, 2025.Photograph from NetflixSave this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyOn Wednesday, the feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem died, at ninety-two. The news broke on Thursday morning. By 5 P.M. Eastern time, Netflix had dropped a new episode of “Famous Last Words,” a fascinating series that offers celebrity postcards from the beyond. Each episode features a sit-down interview with a notable person, filmed months or years prior, with the understanding that it will not be released until after the subject’s death. Steinem’s was the third to appear; a conversation with Jane Goodall popped up within forty-eight hours of her death, last October; and another, with the TV heartthrob Eric Dane, came out right after he died, of complications from A.L.S., in February. Not even the show’s producers know the release schedule—that’s up to the chief content officer in the sky.“My hope is that we’re changing the conversation around fame and around death,” Brad Falchuk, the show’s host and executive producer, told me in May. We spoke again this week, in the hours between Steinem’s death and the appearance of her interview. Falchuk is known as the co-creator, with Ryan Murphy, of such shows as “Glee,” “American Horror Story,” and “Pose.” He’s also famously married to Gwyneth Paltrow. Each episode of “Famous Last Words” begins with his voice-over: “Imagine if we had the opportunity to hear from a cultural icon after they’ve passed away.” Then he ushers his subject into a softly lit set that looks like an empty planetarium, save for two chairs on a central platform. At the end of forty-five minutes or so of conversation, Falchuk leaves the room, and the subject delivers a final message, facing directly to camera. Fade out, forever.Nothing on television is quite like “Famous Last Words,” which falls somewhere between “Inside the Actors Studio” and a video will. Falchuk is part Oprah Winfrey, part death doula, part celebrity Grim Reaper. The subject, like Schrödinger’s cat, is both alive and newly deceased. The show’s promise is that, unlike in other interviews, these well-publicized figures can finally speak freely, knowing that it will be seen only after they’re gone. “I’m dead, so I won’t have repercussions,” Goodall notes cheerily. Dane, flashing his handsome-devil eyes, says, “It’s a weird concept to kind of grapple with. You and I are talking here, right now, and we’re both very alive. And, at the same time, when this exists—if it ever does—I won’t be here.” Falchuk told me, “The idea is that, for the first time, these very famous people are going to give a safe interview, where they don’t have to worry about what they say.”As someone who interviews celebrities for a living, I appreciate any twist to the form, which can get bogged down by promotional pablum and canned anecdotes. We can thank Denmark for the show’s specific innovation: Falchuk and his producing partner, Mikkel Bondesen, who is Danish, adapted “Famous Last Words” from a series created by Mikael Bertelsen, “Det Sidste Ord” (“The Last Word”), which covers subjects who are, in Falchuk’s words, “Danish famous.” They borrowed the basic aesthetics from the Danish version: the cameras are discreet and remotely operated, and the crew have no access to the audio, giving the subject a veil of privacy. The spare set—Falchuk pointed out “the Zen quality of the color of the wood”—is transportable. Goodall’s and Dane’s episodes were filmed in L.A., in a location “tucked away from all the typical stages,” Falchuk said, while Steinem’s took place on the West Side of Manhattan. Once an interview is taped, it’s quickly edited and put in a vault. Only a tiny number of people know who’s on the roster, including just “one or two people at Netflix,” Falchuk told me. “It’s all highly, highly classified, with lots of N.D.A.s.” When a subject dies, the Netflix apparatus leaps into motion. Unlike with its other shows, Netflix posts the new episodes before adding subtitles in other languages, to avoid adding translators into the inner sanctum.So far, Falchuk has filmed seven episodes, four of which are still under lock and key. The first one was shot more than three years ago and has yet to be seen. Steinem, who sat for her interview in February, 2025, was the fourth to be filmed; Goodall and Dane were fifth and sixth, respectively. I imagined a Whiteboard of Death in the Netflix office, but Falchuk insisted that there’s nothing that ghoulish. Presumably, though, his job is something of a morbid guessing game, like prewriting obituaries. Plenty of luminaries have turned him down. “The majority of people aren’t ready to do it,” he said. He typically asks first for an informal conversation. He met Steinem at her apartment, he recalled, where she sat on her couch and they discussed “things that were important to her” before she agreed. Goodall wanted her interview to cover current affairs—a dicey prospect, since no one knew how much time would elapse before it appeared. (It turned out to be only seven months.) Dane, who died at fifty-three, wanted his two young daughters to know who he was.Inevitably, each interview turns to mortality itself. Goodall, perhaps surprisingly, says that she believes in an afterlife, while Dane presumes that “when the lights go out, it’s over.” Steinem says that we’re alive whenever someone thinks of us, which is something of a hedge. The conversations take strange turns. Goodall enters in a turtleneck and an Africa-shaped necklace, clutching a stuffed monkey, and downs some whiskey (“for my throat”), then launches into a well-worn story about dung beetles. Midway through, Falchuk asks if she believes in God, and Goodall recalls a monsoon season in Malaysia when she successfully “asked the rain to stop.” When Falchuk asks whom she imagines will greet her in the afterlife, she says that she wants to see her “special” chimps and her childhood dog, plus her mother—but doesn’t much care about her two husbands. She was in love with both men, she explains, but “wasn’t enough in love.” The one man she truly loved, she reveals, was married to someone else. But she declines to give his name, so as not to upset his family. There are repercussions, after all.Dane’s episode is rawer. Unlike Goodall and Steinem, who lived to their nineties, he has the air of a man robbed by illness. In a wheelchair and struggling to speak (“I sound like a frog,” Dane complains), the onetime Dr. McSteamy from “Grey’s Anatomy” revisits his turbulent past: his father’s apparent suicide, his mother’s “black belt in denial,” his failed marriage, his addiction problems, his history of self-loathing. “It’s kind of a fucked-up way of realizing that you were enough the whole time, when everything gets taken away,” he says. Every so often, he breaks into a mischievous grin, his dreamboat charisma undimmed. And, whereas Goodall addresses her “final message” to all of humanity (“Do your best while you’re still on this beautiful planet Earth”), Dane delivers his directly to his daughters, Billie and Georgia, advising them to live in the moment, fall in love, and choose their friends well. It’s absolutely shattering. As the lights fade and the dates 1972-2026 appear beside his profile, it comes as a shock that he’s dead. His presence on camera—roiled, charming, vulnerable—is so incandescently alive.Steinem, dressed in a chic lipstick-red longline blazer, is the show’s steeliest subject yet. She enters on Falchuk’s arm, with a cane, and seems skeptical at first, swatting away the host’s suggestions that their conversation is “private” (“Except we’re being recorded!”) and that she’s the “face of the feminist movement.” (Women of color, she says, are central to the cause.) She recounts her oft-recounted life story with poise and self-deprecating humor. But she seems to find all the talk of her own death lightly amusing, and she comes off as much too booked and busy to dwell on her own demise. (Case in point: she was scheduled to appear at our own New Yorker Festival next month.) “I don’t know if we can contemplate our own nonexistence,” Steinem says dryly. The one question that stops her cold is about her late husband’s death: as he was ailing, she recalls, they took a tiny plane to California to see his family. Falchuk asks if she cried during the flight. “No, I was just scared,” she replies. “Crying connotes a solution.”This has been a late-summer season of mourning: Hayden Panettiere, Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, Yayoi Kusama. The public reckonings with these figures’ legacies—the troubled former child star gone too soon, the beloved icon, the cult favorite, the complicated eccentric—have come in a cascade. Often, when someone close to us dies, we feel a pang of irony: the one person we most want to talk about our grief with is the deceased. The same is true of public figures: Who could have soothed our pain over the loss of Dolly Parton better than Dolly Parton? “Famous Last Words” offers a balm, along with the promise, fulfilled or not, of unguarded honesty. (I do hope that one of its subjects will take the opportunity to settle some scores.)Falchuk hopes to help society dispel the “taboo of death.” “We are suffering with a culture of a lot of people refusing to face the fact that they’re not going to be here forever, and that they are wonderfully irrelevant,” he told me. Look around at the billionaire biohackers trying to achieve immortality and you see that he has a point. Like a hospice nurse, Falchuk himself has had to get comfortable with mortality. “It’s been a transformative experience, because I’m intentionally bringing death into my life,” he said. The release of each new episode is bittersweet: “I’m still grieving them as people that I care about. It’s weird to think they’re gone.” ?