Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande examines why American medicine so often fails people at the end of life, in this FRONTLINE documentary built around his book of the same name. Gawande sits with patients weighing chemotherapy against time at home, with families arguing over feeding tubes and hospice, and with doctors who admit they were trained to fight death rather than talk about it. The film follows specific cases through diagnosis, treatment decisions, and final days, letting silences and hard conversations play out rather than cutting away from them. Gawande's own father, also a surgeon, becomes one of the film's throughlines as he faces a fatal diagnosis and has to decide, alongside his son, what he actually wants from the time he has left. The documentary doesn't argue for a single answer so much as for asking the question earlier: what makes a life worth living, and what tradeoffs a person would accept to get more of it. The result is plain, unhurried, and hard to watch away from.