The Netflix Show That Airs from the Great Beyond

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.