Original subtitles

[soft music]

MAN: Everyone is talking about this right now,

and I literally have not stopped thinking about it.

MAN 2: This story is so crazy. MAN: It's just really...

MAN 3: This is where it gets nuts, though. I'm speechless!

WOMAN: We are going to talk about Elisabeth Finch,

a television writer on a medical drama, Grey's Anatomy,

who reigned supreme. [applause]

And the Golden Globe goes to...

Grey's Anatomy.

[applause]

I'd like to thank every single writer

who writes on the show.

[music swells]

KILEY DONOVAN: As a writer,

Elisabeth Finch knew exactly what she was doing.

She would just like, break people open and make them cry.

MATT GRAHAM: She wanted to be the figure

that a lot of people looked up to.

The guru to female TV writers.

People feel seen and heard

and empowered by the story that she wrote.

ANDY REASER: Her writing was so highly regarded

because Finch had been through so much.

Finchie wrote that episode and deserves all the nominations.

AURORA LEE PASSIN: She would tell me, like,

maybe I'm suffering this way

so that I can write this way, too?

ELISABETH FINCH: Honestly, I don't know anyone

who doesn't feel like an impostor.

[tense music]

MATT: I remember turning on my phone,

and the sound of about 20 messages.

Da-ding! Ding! Ding da-ding! [phone chiming]

And then I looked at my phone.

"Dude, have you heard about Elisabeth Finch?"

ANDY: I was like, what kind of monster--

Like what are you even... this doesn't compute with me

-on any level. -We start now with a story

that has incredible drama

and could actually be a plot line on Grey's Anatomy.

In my mind, that was like, just the ultimate betrayal.

I would want to say to her, like, what the fuck?

There couldn't possibly be anything bigger than this!

But it was also that validating feeling of...

I am not crazy, y'all!

Okay, it's officially on the record.

The sheer scope, the magnitude, for decades...

Oh my God, she's brilliant!

I have been taken by a genius!

[music swells]

[pensive music]

ELISABETH:Every time you have to go write something,

it's a blank piece of paper.

I say what is my instinct telling me to do?

I have to write like everyone I know is dead.

[chuckles]

Which I know sounds really creepy.

But if you're headed into risky territory, keep going.

MATT: I knew Elisabeth Finch

because I was at film school with her at USC

in the early 2000s.

ELISABETH: When you're on the threshold of true success,

work is what you do.

Writing is how I make my way in the world.

It defines who I am.

MATT: She was one of these people who was

absolutely confident in everything she said.

She was going to make it big.

[rhythmic music]

[crowd cheering]

First of all, has anyone ever been in a giant room

where you seriously know every single person?

It's really freaky and amazing

to be surrounded by a room of people that I love so fiercely

and who love me so fiercely.

[applause]

MATT: When she turned 40, she had a huge party

celebrating this huge birthday

with TV writers, directors, top execs.

Anyone who looked up to her.

CROWD: * Happy birthday to you **

[cheering]

MATT: But I was under the impression this person

was running out of time.

Everyone here in this room is someone that I know and love.

And over these last very...

bizarre seven years,

has been instrumental in, uh,

helping me get to 40.

MATT: Her story was extraordinary.

It has everything.

Loyalty, treachery.

And most of all, ambition.

So, thank you all for-- [crowd cheers]

MATT: The truth is, Hollywood is a factory town.

That's all I know.

It's where story is created.

Essentially, I think she probably saw her life

like a TV series.

It was gripping.

And for years, it fooled Hollywood.

It fooled us all.

[gentle music]

PODCAST HOST: So, Elisabeth, now.

You grew up in Jersey?

At what point did you get the writing bug?

Uh-huh.

REBECCA: I knew Beth Finch

in middle school and high school.

Specifically, Cherry Hill East, where we went.

People moved out of the city or moved to Cherry Hill

because you wanted to send your kid to Cherry Hill East,

which was one of the best schools.

Theatre was big there.

And she was one of the theatre kids.

[dramatic music]

But there was always a darkness around her.

She wrote a play

called Daddy's Home,

all about a girl who's abused by her father.

I was sitting next to her parents,

and her mother was in tears the entire time.

But the play got accolades.

It went on to win state-wide play competitions,

and the theatre elites of Cherry Hill East loved her.

[tense music]

ELISABETH: My mother and father swore

that everything that made me a pain in the ass as a child,

the strong will,

the determination to make my own decisions,

was going to make me an excellent adult.

I'd decided to be a writer.

AURORA: I met Elisabeth Finch in 1996,

and she was 18,

and she was a freshman learning about writing.

And we hit it off immediately.

And things went from friendship to flirty

to "Oh, what are these weird feelings?"

As a gay kid in Kansas in the '90s,

somebody that has a lot in common with you

makes you a whole lot less weird real fast.

And that's a nice feeling.

That's a wonderful feeling, actually, and...

we had a relationship, briefly.

And then we stayed very close friends. Um...

You just felt like the spotlight was both on you

and you were the audience to something just riveting.

[soft music]

ELISABETH: Well I went to grad school as USC

for playwriting.

But I took a couple TV classes,

and thought like wow, this feels home.

And so I switched over to scripting TV.

[rock music]

AURORA: After she graduated, she got a gig in LA.

She was pretty darn happy at True Blood.

ELISABETH: I worked as an assistant

the first season for True Blood. And then,

they fired one of the writers,

uh, for not doing their job. And...

I got his.

For me. No matter what.

Don't eat anyone.

AURORA: She went on to Vampire Diaries.

Seemed to be working her way up the ladder, so to speak.

I became known as "Vampire Girl."

Everything with like superpowers

or all these kinds of things.

And then you emerge 24 hours later overnight

as a baby vampire.

AURORA: But she wanted to move forward.

It's never going to be the same, Elena.

ELISABETH: I'd been on a bunch of Vampire Diaries,

and I had a... I was done with vampires

and wanted to move into more human drama.

I had interviewed to be Shonda's assistant

for Grey's Anatomy.

Okay, they're going to find Teddy. It's gonna be okay.

It's gonna be okay, it's gonna be okay.

ELISABETH: It was between me and the other guy,

and the other guy got the job.

And then I walked out of the office being grumbly

and like, "Oh I'm never gonna watch it, whatever."

And then it became my favorite show.

Kiss me.

AURORA: She was like, "This is really good TV!"

We would watch it every week, and we'd like scream at it.

ELISABETH: I was super obsessed with Grey's.

And I had every episode memorized in my head.

There were two things it was clear she wanted.

One was being an executive producer some day,

and the other was, you know,

getting a gig on Grey's Anatomy.

She tried more than once, I think.

She wrote a sample script and sent it to them,

but she didn't get that job,

so she was very disappointed.

[keyboard clacking]

But she was always a very driven person.

She liked to set a goal

and execute it, and she gets it done.

And um... Whatever that "it" is.

[keyboard clacking]

She just didn't want to be a nobody

from nowhere with nothing to say.

She wanted to be somebody.

She was a great writer,

but there's so many good writers.

So in order to get work in Hollywood,

you have to be so interesting

that people will just want to meet you.

[tense music]

AURORA: I was always in email contact with Finch,

but one day I got this package.

She sent a book called The Fault in our Stars.

And I thought, "Why? Why would she do this?"

But Finch had always been very, very good

at indirect communication.

I remember reading that book and realizing it was about cancer.

And saying, at the time, like, she's got cancer!

She's got cancer.

[sombre music]

Then eventually, she confided in me

that she had this kind of bone cancer in her spine,

and then she said that it's terminal.

And terminal means the funeral is coming sooner

than it would have otherwise.

Um... That was devastating.

She told me she's gonna be all on her own

out in Minnesota at the Mayo Clinic

for this chemo stuff, and...

I end up offering to come and be with her

while she's doing her treatments.

We stayed at a friend's condo

and she'd go into the bathroom

and I'd hear her vomiting.

She's sitting with her head in her hands

just moaning and crying.

She was physically hurting

and there was nothing I could do

except be with her.

I remember thinking Finch always said,

"Show up."

That's what's important about being a friend.

But she didn't make it easy.

I drove her to the clinic.

I was surprised

because she told me to stay in the car.

Well, the chemo takes a... Takes a while.

And I just figured she wasn't thinking clearly,

so I parked, and I got out,

and I sat in the lounge and I waited.

You know, just texting, reading.

Just passing the time.

Eventually she showed up

and she was angry with me

for having come inside the Mayo Clinic,

instead of waiting inside the car like I was supposed to.

She was very upset.

It was weird, and I felt really hurt.

But you can forgive anything

when your friend tells you they're dying.

[dramatic music]

ELISABETH: I catch fragmented glimpses

of my bald reflection in the mirror.

My surgeon told me,

"I've never seen anything like this,

especially in someone your age."

Chondrosarcoma.

Bone cancer.

AURORA: Finch was suffering so much.

She was like, "I'm gonna turn it into an article

and I'm gonna share my story."

[music builds]

Finch's story was all about fighting back.

ELISABETH: My salve came in the form of

Friday Night Lights.

Coach Taylor's epic speeches about character

and beating the odds.

State was the victory that would make

every battle along the way worth it.

"State" became the team's battle cry.

And in a very real way, it became mine, too.

Let's go. [distant cheering]

[phone buzzing]

ELISABETH: Staring at the dark bedroom ceiling,

suddenly my phone began buzzing insistently.

[buzzing continues]

I had two dozen texts,

each with a photo of a different friend

holding up a sign bearing one word,

state.

[inspiring music]

AURORA: Even the star Kyle Chandler joined in.

The response was incredible.

I'll just call it the Friday Night Lights campaign.

[uplifting music]

MARK WILDING: I remember reading the article

and I was very moved by it.

And I'm like, wow,

this woman has really gone through it.

And the article was really well written.

[overlapping chatter]

And that got noticed by Shonda Rhimes.

PHOTOGRAPHER: Shonda, one right up here, please?

MARK: I think what Shonda brought to the table

that was new in the world of television

was that she had these very strong female characters.

You have to stop thinking of me as an employee

and start thinking of me as what I am.

-And what is that? -The boss.

MARK: But they were flawed. And at the end of the day,

they would somehow redeem themselves

through the good things they did.

He's alive! He's alive.

He's unconscious, but he's alive.

Take Owen to the OR and take that bullet out and get...

MARK: And in Grey's Anatomy, it was, you know,

doctors saving lives every week.

The absolute best part of creating shows

and producing shows for me is really the other writers.

The very dark and twisty writers' rooms that we have.

MARK: I think Shonda thought

that because of Finch having cancer

and being in the middle of our, you know, health system,

she would be a good person to sort of generate stories

for Grey's Anatomy.

What got you to Grey's Anatomy?

My agents called me and said, "Shonda wanted to meet you."

Um... And I thought we were just meeting to like,

say hey! I was like, oh I'm sorry,

I didn't know I was here for a job.

I thought we were just talking.

Um, so I went to Grey's.

AURORA: It was always Finch's goal.

And so when she did get the gig there, that was like,

man, eye on the prize, she-she Babe Ruthed that.

ANDY REASER: Elisabeth Finch and I started at the same time,

2014.

And we worked together for seven years.

It felt really awesome. I mean, Grey's Anatomy,

it was certainly the most

well-known show I had ever worked on

and still blows my mind.

The writers' room at Grey's is incredibly intimate.

You're spending hours upon hours with people

and you're thinking about very emotional things.

ELISABETH: We stayed in the room for about 10 hours a day,

eat a lot of snacks that we shouldn't,

and talk about story.

There's one thing in common that we have,

which is our passion and our love for TV.

ANDY: I don't know of an environment

where people just speak as candidly as they do

in writers' rooms.

I mean it was a close-knit group.

But Finch had a very encyclopedic

knowledge of the show.

Like she could say, "Oh that's like in season 5

when this happened and this happened."

ELISABETH: I didn't bother playing it cool

and figured that having someone

with the knowledge of that show

from an audience perspective might be valuable.

I mean, sometimes people would say, "That didn't happen"

or "that did happen" and then there would be like,

okay, let's go to the computers, and then she'd be proven right,

and then, you know. Stick it in the other person's face.

KILEY: I was a writer on Grey's for six seasons.

And it's one of those things where,

when you're trying to break in as a writer,

it seems like... the greatest possible job.

And it is in many ways, but it's a big learning curve.

The expression read the room is never more applicable

than when you get to a writers' room.

No one's telling you, but like,

you have to learn when to shut up, and when...

to speak up, and um, who do you want to be on your side.

It's complicated.

And most people don't even make it past their first year.

And I remember hearing this one writer,

Elisabeth Finch, had been on the chopping block

just based on writing alone.

[pensive music]

MARK: The people who were running the show at that point

were really not happy with...

her contributions in the writers' room,

and with the scripts that Finchie wrote.

They wanted to fire her.

And then there was a call from leadership above saying,

maybe rethink this one.

They said, "You can't fire Finchie,

Finchie has cancer.

She has to stay on the show."

[tense music]

ANDY: When I met Finch,

she seemed to me like someone who was in remission

and everything was sort of behind her. Um...

But not long after,

she would be going and getting treatment again.

And we were like, oh, my god, Finch, I'm so sorry.

Like, it was awful.

ELISABETH: There's a tiny cluster of cells

still hanging out in my spine as I like to think about it,

that is managed if I do pretty regularly intense medication.

She would wear the head scarf,

and I realized it was chemo hair loss.

Um, you know, if there was a deadline approaching

and then something was going on medically,

my attitude was always Finch was family,

and, take whatever time you need.

The work will get done. We'll figure it out.

ELISABETH: Shonda told me I was amazing.

Brave. Badass.

And then she sent me home. I shook my head.

Respectfully. Hell fecking no.

My work was at stake. My lifeline.

I was determined not to lose it.

I didn't want to stop.

I couldn't stop.

KILEY: I was just really impressed by

the fact that she did show up every day and she had,

you know, a pretty serious work ethic.

ANDY: But as time went on she would look more unwell,

uh you know, with quite a bit of makeup on,

which I figured had to be

'cause she was trying to look less green from the chemo.

There was a day in the writers' room

that she was wearing sort of like a low-cut sweater,

and I noticed for the first time that I could see

her chemo port on her chest.

And I'd never seen one on a person.

Finch was taking breaks to go to the bathroom

and throw up from the chemo.

And it started to really feel like,

I'm going to attend this person's funeral.

But my sense that I got from her

is that she didn't want to confide in people

about her cancer.

It was very much like "I'm soldiering through this,

do not treat me differently.

I don't want sympathy, it's condescending."

And she was very private with us.

But it was strange because

Finch had a really large reach on social media.

And she would talk about her own cancer,

and her own experience with it,

and there would be like, interactions with celebrities.

And like, "Finch knows everyone"

would be a thing that we just started saying.

She says she doesn't want attention,

and she doesn't want everybody

catering to her all the time.

But Finch's social media

was very self-congratulatory.

Truly it did feel sometimes like,

two different Finches.

ELISABETH: For me it was very much a process,

and you know, I had kept some things quiet,

and was ready to let people in as I saw fit.

There's a difference between being secretive to me,

or being quiet about it and private about it,

to being a liar. And I...

pride myself in not being the liar.

[tense music]

[keyboard clacking]

ELISABETH: When I'm watching a story,

whether it's fiction, whether it's documentary,

I can tell when someone is speaking a truth.

I know when it's from a point of view

of a lived human experience.

And I think that that's what people are craving.

ANDY: She knew so much about the step by step nuts and bolts

that went into being in a hospital

and living in a hospital for a prolonged period of time.

You could bounce things off with her, or you could say like,

"Did-- When you were in the hospital, did this happen?"

So she became the cancer expert in the room.

Elisabeth, how has the fact

that you are a writer who has a disability

impacted the Grey's Anatomy writing room?

I wrote a couple episodes about a character

who was going through cancer and ends up living with cancer

because that's my specific lived experience.

[serious music]

KILEY: I remember when Finch pitched

that we do the story

of her particular type of cancer, chondrosarcoma.

And if it's chondrosarcoma?

Chondro is a beast.

KILEY: She pitched it as a long-term storyline

for Debby Allen's character, Catherine Fox.

We may be able to cut it out without, uh...

Making me a quadriplegic which means,

I'll never operate again.

ANDY: When Finch was writing that episode, she was like,

"You need to rethink the way that you think about cancer."

She was like, "Don't say people beat cancer."

[typing]

MEREDITH GREY: Battle.

Fight.

Win.

Lose.

These are the words we use when someone is diagnosed

with an illness or a disease.

KILEY: Finch's point was like, cancer isn't somehow a game

that you win or lose.

And she wanted to change the language.

There were 13 people in my clinical trial.

Uh, I am the last one who is alive.

Am I the winner? Are they losers for dying?

KYLEY: The narrative she experienced was like,

there are people who just live with it,

and you're not on death's door,

but you're also not cancer free.

I'll have to live with this cancer the rest of my life.

Cause they had seen me for years live with cancer

and be in the writers' room and carry on a full life.

HOST: That's amazing.

ANDY: I read the PDF of it and I was like, this is fantastic.

You don't have to worry about turning this in, it's great.

I mean the dialogue just jumped off the page.

I have survived racism, sexism,

every "ism" designed to make me feel small

and make me less.

If I can do all of that, if I can survive all of that,

then I just might survive this too.

ANDY: That episode was really successful.

And it got a lot of press.

Joining me is Elisabeth Finch.

She is a co-executive producer

and writer for Grey's Anatomy.

Finch was beloved. People on set loved her,

the showrunner loved her.

Well, Finchie wrote that episode

for any Emmy voters

who are watching. [chuckling]

ANDY: Debby Allen would give her a ride into work.

KYLEY: At this point she was co-executive producer,

highly paid writer.

But it felt like...

that wasn't enough.

MATT: You've gotta realize, in Hollywood,

the pressure was extraordinary.

She wanted to be the figure that people looked up to.

The guru to female TV writers.

A sort of right on, truth-telling person.

Very aware of current events,

kind of an activist.

Me too, NYC, cause we are doing this again!

[crowd cheering]

KILEY: The MeToo movement gave everyone permission

to start talking openly about things that you sort of

just buried away forever.

[serious music]

All of us were pretty triggered in like,

in our own ways.

There was this story from Finch

about what had happened on a previous show.

ELISABETH: Three minutes into a rehearsal

on my episode of The Vampire Diaries,

the director screams,

"If I wanted to talk to a nagging cunt,

I'd go home to my wife."

I laugh for every damn day of that shoot.

Laugh through his lewd jokes about actresses' bodies

and lingering hugs

and clammy hands on the back of my neck,

giving me massages I never want but allow anyway.

LISINA STONEBURNER: I was the acting coach

on The Vampire Diaries.

Finch was there for three seasons.

I worked with her. A lot.

And when the Hollywood Reporter article came out

about the harassment, I couldn't believe it.

And the very next thing I did

was call the script supervisor.

And the two of us stayed on the phone for three hours.

We were going through the article together

literally line by line by line.

But it was all very...

surprising.

[sombre music]

[ticking]

At this point, she...

was in like a kind of a golden position.

KILEY: She was near to the top but it felt like

she wanted more. She wanted to be an important voice.

I started to notice that

whenever there was something being talked about

in the zeitgeist, or the news,

Finch always seemed to have a connection to it,

uh, or her own personal experience or story.

MARK: Abortion being a big subject in this country,

she weighed in on the issue.

She was saying that at one point she'd been pregnant,

and she had an abortion

because of the chemotherapy that she was undergoing.

I am more than my preexisting conditions,

more than the tumor in my spine,

more than what my uterus can or cannot do.

She got a lot of attention for that piece.

You know, she's this writer, living with cancer,

and now she also has the definitive abortion story.

[dramatic music] And now it felt like

abortion was another subject that Finch owned,

and if we're gonna do it on the show

we're going to do her version.

Those words weren't spoken but that was always the vibe.

[ticking]

Members of the Tree of Life synagogue,

conducting a peaceful service

in their place of worship

were brutally murdered by a gunman

targeting them simply because of their faith.

ANDY: There was an attack in Pittsburgh,

and I remember hearing about it on the news,

and thinking oh my god, this is terrible.

And then when I got to work,

I learned that Finch had left.

KILEY: I was there. She ran to her office,

grabbed all her stuff, and just left with no explanation,

and then I think like texted to say like,

"This is what's happening, I'm getting on a plane right now

to go to Pittsburgh."

ANDY: We found out that Finch

had gone to that synagogue in the past

and knew some of the people who were murdered.

And per Jewish law,

she was going there to help.

Jewish law generally forbids autopsies

and generally encourages burial as quickly as possible,

usually within about 24 hours.

ANDY: Someone needed to be with the bodies,

and to help collect remains,

or as much of remains... are available.

And she felt like she had to

'cause she owed it to them.

I can't imagine what that would have felt like for her.

To go there and have to be at the scene of that crime.

And at the place that would be sacred

and holy and safe for you,

and then for her to like know these old women

who had been killed.

It was just, it was awful.

I just felt like how much can this one person endure.

[typing]

MARK: I remember talking to Andy Reaser,

and I said, do you understand how odd that sounds?

The fact that she had to go in, you know,

scoop up her friend's brains?

I mean, that's pretty heavy-duty.

Also, the FBI is there!

It's a crime scene!

And he said, "You know, I'm a Christian,

and I don't necessarily know all the tenets

of the Jewish faith. I certainly didn't think

to question her."

I felt like, man, she cannot catch a break.

Like how is it that so many awful things

keep happening to this poor woman

who's like just trying to survive?

MARK: Somebody did say to her,

"I can't believe you've been through all this stuff,"

and Finchie's response was "I can't believe it either."

[pensive music]

KILEY: If you were one of the people that she liked,

it was sort of like,

when the sun shines on you, it's warm.

We texted and had our own inside jokes

and we got pedicures together.

Then we would close the door and chat

and talk about each other's lives.

I definitely considered her a friend.

At some point we had a drink,

and I shared something that happened to me.

Kind of something I was processing,

which was that my biological father

was my mother's rapist.

And I had not, I had not processed that trauma,

that information at all, as like,

this is my origin story. This is part of my identity.

It was like, I felt for my mom,

and I knew that she had gone through something

that she had not processed in any way.

And, heavy, heavy shit unraveling all of that.

You might want justice,

and I want you to have everything you need to do that.

And that was around the time that Finch started writing

an episode that she called Silent All These Years,

where the character Jo Wilson is treating a woman

who had been assaulted

and was going to administer a rape kit to her.

[tense music]

But then, the second element of the episode was in the past,

Jo had flashbacks to meeting her mother

and learning that she had been conceived...

in rape.

I fought as hard as I could

but he would not take no for an answer.

So...

Nine months later I had a baby.

I had you.

And, just even hearing that story, like,

I have not even told this story myself,

and I'm a writer. Like, I haven't even had the chance

to figure out if I want to tell this story,

and now it's an episode,

and it was really starting to bug me,

that this is going to be

the high-profile episode post MeToo.

I asked permission to not have a writers' room for that,

so I wrote that by myself.

Doctor Karev asked us to all stand here, do we know why?

Just that a patient needs us.

She needs all of us.

Okay.

ANDY: For the episode dealing with rape,

every female member of the crew

was invited, if they wanted to, to come stand in scrubs,

and be in the show.

[dramatic music]

ELISABETH: And they forced me into scrubs

and made me hold the gurney all the way down the hallway.

So I'm like right there.

And then every photo advertising the episode

had my face on it.

Which, there was a lot, at the time.

ANDY: And the episode came together so well,

that's an episode that people come up to me still and say,

"Oh my god, I saw that episode,

I was crying the whole time, I couldn't believe it,

you guys did such a wonderful job."

And I would say, well that was Elisabeth Finch.

[pensive music]

KILEY: I tried to not make a big deal out of it.

And I tried to tell myself,

this is what it is being in a writers' room.

You share parts of yourself, you share your stories,

and then people internalize them.

But looking back, it was super painful.

It just felt really, it felt weird. And wrong.

And uh,

I never confronted Finch about it because it felt,

A, I was a lower-level writer,

and she was a co-executive producer,

and was being heralded for this amazing script.

And it didn't feel like I had a leg to stand on,

or that it was appropriate.

[applause]

She wrote the episode, she's a co-executive producer,

an amazing human being. Elisabeth Finch.

ANDY: Finch talked on panels, people had heard of her.

Camilla Luddington.

ANDY: And after Silent All These Years,

she became very interested in the character Jo,

played by Camilla Luddington.

The character became more popular,

so, like when we would do writers' reads,

Finch would always want to read Jo.

And I thought, she does seem kind of

preoccupied with this character,

but, maybe she has a crush on the actress?

I mean any time Jo's story would come up,

it seems like Finch would kind of yoink it for herself.

ELISABETH: When you're pitching a story,

you can pitch for your favorite ones to write.

So they just said, "Can you take the Jo stuff

for the rest of the season," and there were fivemore episodes.

So I would write Jo's stuff

because they knew I was in her headspace,

if that makes sense?

I know it sounds a little fruity.

ANDY: So, Finch had a real stake in...

telling stories with her, and through her.

Whatever life you had,

tell me it wasn't better than mine.

Jo had already been through a lot in the show.

Hey.

KILEY: She had an abusive ex-husband,

who then came back and like, basically tried to kill her.

You point fingers at everyone else around you,

but you're the monster.

And then, Finch really pushed this...

story of sending Jo down a really dark path.

ELISABETH: As a story teller, I often find myself asking,

what is the worst-case scenario?

It's thrilling to imagine what it takes for a character

to climb out of her own personal depths.

MATT: What people want is a good story.

You have to start small,

and get bigger and bigger and bigger.

I'm not okay.

KILEY: Finch said the only option

was for Jo to go into inpatient treatment.

Um, I'm checking in my wife, Josephine Karev.

You need to drive around,

you say goodbye there, she goes in on foot.

[gate creaks]

ANDY: Not long after,

Finch was supposed to have been working on the script,

but called like the day we were supposed

to get the outline and said,

"I've had a complete breakdown

from being at that attack in Pittsburgh.

I'm going to get treatment for PTSD."

KILEY: Before she went in for PTSD treatment,

there was a total embargo in the writers' room

on any mention of guns, or gunshots,

or even using the expression "shooting the idea down."

Finch would get, like, physically,

visibly upset,

and you could see that she was traumatized.

It was concerning.

But it was strange circumstance because...

very soon after we sent the character Jo Wilson

off to inpatient PTSD treatment,

Finch was then going away for the same treatment.

[music builds]

[typing]

ANDY: Finch had checked herself into a facility

in Arizona.

She checked in under the name of Jo,

the character on the show that she was dealing with,

which seemed...

very strange.

Jo, you've had a depressive episode

caused by intense trauma.

JENN BEYER: I remember like, seeing Finch,

or at that time I knew her as Jo, cause she went by Jo,

in a chair up against the wall,

and just scared of like all the noise.

Like just, her eyes darting everywhere

and trying to figure out what's going on,

not wanting anybody to walk behind her,

and not wanting anybody to touch her and like...

I understood that.

I was at a facility, Sierra Tucson,

for many months before meeting Jo.

I didn't really talk to many people there,

I was very scared a lot, and quiet.

[soft music]

She started walking with me,

and she was just very kind, like,

"you don't have to talk to me, I'll just be with you.

You don't have to say anything, I understand."

She didn't seem to judge me in any way.

I don't know, she was just very kind.

Very loving, very nice.

MARGARET FITA: I met Jenn and Jo in group therapy.

It felt really good that Jenn could have that person,

because I think that Jenn,

she was the sickest person there. You know?

Like she was sometimes hysterical, crying, screaming,

clearly in some sort of major distress.

And Jo was specifically very protective over Jenn.

Ancient Egypt.

We haven't seen any camels yet.

JENN: She would just be silly.

There she goes.

I could be having the worst time, the worst day.

She could make me laugh.

I hadn't laughed in a long time.

[laughter]

There's somebody in here who knows how to survive.

JENN: After a while,

she asked me about being roommates.

As a rule, you couldn't be a roommate with somebody

if you were in their process group.

But she was able to get it approved.

And she would leave like silly notes on the bed.

When she said she loved me, it wasn't like I love you,

like a relationship love. It was just like,

I really care about you, I'm not going anywhere.

MARGARET: I knew that they were close.

But it felt like

Jo became more interested in being my friend

once I think I was like kind of talking

and hanging out with Jenn.

JENN: I was very, very, very touched

that she would take time to...

talk to me about my life.

Getting to know, like what I was there for,

and my story.

I had a wall of pictures of the kids up.

She would always listen to like--

Whenever I wanted to tell her about this kid or that kid.

It was hard.

But I told her...

um, what happened.

I have five children.

And I was a nurse at the hospital.

My name's Brendan Byer.

JENN: And Brendan was a local political activist.

What democracy looks like!

JENN: We seemed like the perfect family.

But Brendan abused me physically and mentally.

Eventually I got a protection order,

and he wasn't allowed within 900 feet of me.

But Brendan kept stalking me

and at times he'd be standing in our yard.

Because of the danger I was in, I was having a PTSD reaction.

One day,

I had a dissociative episode

and I didn't know where I was

and I didn't know where the children were.

Brendan convinced people that I was, uh...

psychotic.

And I lost custody of the children.

And I was afraid I would never get them back.

And that's why I was at Sierra Tucson.

MARGARET: Jenn's story was obviously super intense,

so Jenn would have a lot of these trauma triggers.

You couldn't move the chair too loud,

or she would be really triggered.

And it was obviously very true. And Jo would...

talk about that as if she also had all of that.

JENN: We both were struggling with PTSD.

When you see someone going through

what you're going through, you connect with them.

We just grew closer because of our similarities.

And I felt safe

to talk to her about Brendan's patterns

and ways of behavior,

and the way he would say things, and how he acted.

[phone chiming]

AURORA: I got a message from Finch

for the first time in a long time.

And she asked me to come to Arizona.

Eventually I get there and she says,

"Tell them you're here for Jo."

She said that she took that name from the character on Grey's.

-You have a name? -Jo Wilson.

Oh, nice.

I was just like, well sure, that seems random as hell,

but, fine.

And then she greets me,

and she wants to take a walk.

And then she tells me

her brother used to beat the shit out of her.

I was gobsmacked,

I had never heard a bad thing about Eric.

All I'd ever heard about Eric was that he was older than her,

kind of pretty funny guy, she seemed to admire him.

But then she had a realization,

she says, "My brother assaulted me brutally as a child.

And it turns out that's what I'm really all upset about."

JENN: She had discovered physical abuse from her brother

was her real issue,

even more than what happened at the synagogue.

So I just kept saying like, I'm so sorry. I did, I did.

I was just, I was devastated for her.

Devastated.

[sighs]

JENN: Shortly before my discharge date,

Brendan sent a video.

Think I'm leaving to get you soon.

Don't be frightened.

[sighs]

I just need you.

That video terrified me.

I was really, really scared, and really struggling.

I was gonna have to go home and...

I was...

extremely terrified that he was gonna kill me.

MARGARET: At that time,

it seemed like Jo just cared about

finding out everything about Jenn's story.

And then right around the same time that Jenn

was getting these threats from Brendan,

Jo said she was getting threats from her brother.

JENN: She said that there was a hand-written letter

from her brother,

along the lines of she better shut up.

Saying he was coming to get her.

She was having this huge emotional scary crisis

going on at the same time as I am at Sierra Tucson.

And we're both in this room together

and we're both having the same kind of symptoms.

MARGARET: Slowly I realized something about Jo,

that every time there was something with Jenn,

there was something with her, that was... weird.

[soft music]

JENN: At Sierra Tucson, they'll pick a week

that will be their family week.

When it came Jo's time for family week,

she invited her mom and dad.

And then they come into your process group,

and then your group sits around you.

What she said to her parents

is that she had brought them there

so that she could tell them about the trauma

between her and her brother.

And her parents were kind of these,

like a deer in headlights, listening to her.

And they didn't say a lot. Like, they were very confused.

They were very confused about what she was talking about

with her brother. And this is all a very big shock to them.

[sighs]

And then Jo's cancer came up.

[tense music]

Cancer?

Uh... We didn't know anything about cancer.

She hadn't mentioned it before,

but I figured she was private about it,

so I didn't press or ask questions.

Though she always wanted to know everything

that was happening in my life.

Jo seemed very interested

in my therapy sessions with Carly, my therapist.

I started this new treatment called EMDR,

eye movement desensitisation reprocessing,

which helps you process trauma.

Carly was a very trusted person to me.

She would have me talk about a feeling,

and I had tap-

what they call tappers, that I would hold on to,

that buzz in each hand, back and forth.

Jo was constantly asking me questions.

She wanted to know everything.

And I knew very little about her life.

MARGARET: Jo was very private.

When I asked her what she did, you know, what was her job,

and she was just acting very strange,

not wanting to tell me.

I got the vibe that that it was like don't ask me any questions.

JENN: One day she said she needed to leave

'cause she was going on a work thing.

People didn't usually leave for work things here

so that was very different.

Right when she was leaving, she was like,

"Here's a picture of me so you have, you know,

you have somebody safe to look at."

She was wearing scrubs and an OR cap.

You know, obviously I knew she wasn't a nurse or whatever,

so, um, that's when I learned that she was a writer

on Grey's Anatomy and she had, um,

acted in one of the episodes that she wrote.

And she tells me that her name is Elisabeth Finch.

[high-pitched ringing]

I was shocked that she hadn't told me.

But if you're a writer for something that big,

I guess people really, really care

if you're at a mental health facility.

[string music]

ANDY: Finch came back just seemingly much better,

with a lot of stuff she learned there

and wanted to write about.

ELISABETH: I was introduced to EMDR,

which I'd never heard of,

so I was interested in exploring it on the show.

A couple of people on the team had that reaction of,

"Really? Is that possible?"

But, it wasn't hard to convince them.

[typing]

No, no, no. I'm not. I can't do EMDR today.

I'm not doing it. I know it's life-changing or whatever,

but I can't- Not today.

It felt like she had found her way to do great stories.

Make them seem real and convincing.

It was fantastic.

Hi, I'm Carly,

and my core feeling today is pride

because my patient asked for what she needed

for the first time in 22 days.

HOST: Tell us about the Jo- that therapist episode,

how did you research that?

Well, what we'd never seen on Grey's,

because we're primarily a surgical show,

is inpatient treatment for trauma.

EMDR is just another way to get at the root of my trauma.

We did a whole ton of research to make it as specific

and nuanced as possible,

because we were showing a different model of therapy.

And now I'm, I'm what, I'm supposed to

stare at a light bar and all my troubles are gonna disappear?

JENN: EMDR turned out to not be the best thing for me at all,

because things were really escalating,

that felt like it wasn't going to fix it.

Brendan was saying that he was coming to get me,

and I felt like everything was going in reverse

and going backwards again.

What was really fun for me was...

I wanted her to have a flip up in her fear

like she's going backwards.

[device beeps]

You get to a certain point and you feel like

"I'm good now, I'm good now, I'm good now,"

and then something else knocks you off your feet

and you think, "I'm right back where I started."

I was scared I was going back to square one.

And now I'm, now I'm back to square one.

It was great. It was a good one, that was fun.

[dramatic music]

[typing]

Finch is marrying a woman and moving to Kansas!

Mom was like, "We're gonna be a family!"

It was all happening so fast.

[overlapping chatter]

If there's one thing I'm good at,

it's making robots out of magnet tiles.

I trusted her completely.

But I started noticing a pattern.

KILEY: Someone said Finch's brother's in the hospital,

he's on life support.

We heard that Shonda was crying the night of the operation.

She felt that Finch might die.

Things are not matching up.

Somebody isn't coming out of this situation alive.

[laughter]

This is so deep and dark and cruel, and...

it's terrifying.

[dramatic music]