It is rare for a major streaming service to devote six hours to the question of whether death is the end. "Surviving Death" does exactly that – and takes an unusual route: the series does not explain, it shows. People tell their stories, mediums work on camera, researchers provide context. Anyone interested in contact with the deceased will find here the most visible window into this field currently available.
Where the series comes from
Its basis is the 2017 book "Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife" by the American journalist Leslie Kean. Kean is not an esoteric author but an investigative journalist – she was among the authors of the report with which the New York Times made the Pentagon's programme for investigating unidentified aerial phenomena public in 2017. She spent years researching her book, deliberately concentrating on what can be documented.
The adaptation was taken on and directed by Ricki Stern. On 6 January 2021 Netflix released all six episodes at once.
The six episodes
- 1 – Near-Death Experiences: near-death experiences, with the research of Bruce Greyson
- 2 – Mediums Part 1: mediumship, part one
- 3 – Mediums Part 2: mediumship, part two – including physical mediumship
- 4 – Signs from the Dead: signs from those who have died
- 5 – Seeing Dead People: apparitions of the dead
- 6 – Reincarnation: reincarnation, with the children's cases from the University of Virginia
The order is no accident. It begins with the phenomenon most people have at least heard of and works its way towards what is hardest to believe.
The mediumship episodes
For anyone interested in our work, the heart of the series is episodes 2 and 3. What they show is mental mediumship – what a contact with the deceased ordinarily means: a medium perceives impressions and describes them without knowing anything about the deceased person beforehand.
Episode 3 goes further and shows physical mediumship – that rare and contested form in which phenomena are said to occur in the room that everyone present can perceive. This is where opinions divide, and the series makes no secret of it.
Six mediums from our directory
Anyone watching the series will meet several people who are also listed with us. That is no coincidence: Netflix stayed with names that have a reputation to lose in this field.
- Laura Lynne Jackson – in the mediumship episodes; she is also the author of the book "Signs" that gives the signs episode its name
- Angelina Diana – a blinded reading with her is shown, meaning she received no information in advance
- Nicole Janssen – she contributed trance and physical mediumship. A note when looking her up: in the series she appears under her other name, Nicole de Haas
- Colin Bates – a medium of many years and a registered Spiritualist healer
- Joseph Shiel and Rebecca Anne LoCicero – both also appear in the series
One contributor has since died herself: the Irish medium Sandra O'Hara, who gives a group reading in the series, passed away in September 2021.
The research behind it
What distinguishes "Surviving Death" from a collection of personal accounts are the scientists who speak – not as providers of soundbites, but with their own work.
In the first episode that is Bruce Greyson, who shaped near-death research over decades and developed the scale still used today to record near-death experiences. The final episode leads to the children's cases at the University of Virginia, the line of research founded by Ian Stevenson and continued there to this day.
For mediumship, Leslie Kean points to the controlled studies of Julie Beischel at the Windbridge Research Center – studies designed to rule out fraud, cueing, rater bias, cold reading, hot reading and the use of general statements. That is precisely the difference between an impressive reading on television and a robust finding.
What critics object to
The series drew a good deal of criticism, and some of it is justified. The objections come down to three points: that it does not distinguish clearly enough between controlled research and unverified claim; that it presents subjective accounts without the methodological rigour needed to draw conclusions from them; and that it edits interviews with grieving, vulnerable people in a way that suggests a particular interpretation.
Other reviewers saw the opposite: a treatment remarkably restrained for this subject, one that names alternative explanations rather than passing over them.
Both can stand side by side. "Surviving Death" is not a study and does not claim to be. It is a documentary showing how people deal with death and what researchers have found out about it – no more, but no less either. Anyone looking for proof will find it in the journals, not on Netflix. Anyone wanting to know why people work seriously on this subject at all gets six hours of a very good answer.
Sources: The series itself, Netflix; Leslie Kean, "Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife" (2017) and her accompanying pages at lesliekean.com; episode overview and production details after Wikipedia and IMDb.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection – it gathers further films, lectures and studies on mediumship, near-death experience and reincarnation research.