Lily Brooks O’Briant stars as Ella in the new Apple TV+ family series.
Funny thing about disability: it doesn’t singularly affect the person it disables.
No able-bodied person in their right mind would consciously go down the cultural appropriation road and claim to know what it feels like to live with a disability, let alone multitudes. What many can legitimately claim to know is the reverberations they feel from living with someone with disabilities. Especially in more hands-on caregiving situations, the emotional and physical effects of helping a disabled friend or family member live their life can be tremendously taxing. There’s a reason respite care services exist. The literal medical conditions may be alien to others, but make no mistake, the people in a disabled person’s orbit are indelibly affected one way or another; these consequences can be disabling in and of itself.
Cancer is sort of like that too. Nobody in their right mind would claim to know what having cancer is like if they’ve never experienced it, but the effects the condition has on other people are very real indeed. Speaking from personal experience, my own mother battled breast then skin cancer for several years before finally succumbing in 1998. I was 16 years old, just finishing my sophomore year of high school when she died, and still have vivid memories of the whole family-member-has-cancer lifestyle more than two decades later. It was just as exhausting and disabling, particularly mentally, as my actual physical disabilities.
That concept is illustrated to great effect in the just-launched Apple TV+ family series, Life By Ella, which premiered on the tech titan’s streaming video service at the beginning of this month. The ten-episode first season stars Lily Brooks O’Briant as the title character Ella, a 13-year-old middle schooler who attempts to reclaim semblances of normalcy after a long hospital stint battling cancer. The show chronicles the trials and tribulations of Ella’s journey back to life alongside her parents and younger brother, as well as her two best friends at school.
The trailer for Life By Ella can be seen on YouTube.
As the cancer patient, Life By Ella is ultimately about Ella. The chemotherapy process disabled her, emotionally and obviously physically. But the disease was just as disabling in its own right to the people around her. Even amidst Ella’s clear star status, show co-creators and executive producers Jeff Hodsden and Tim Pollock sought to put a much-deserved spotlight on the experiences of the people behind the condition. What Ella’s diagnosis does to her family and friends is just as poignant and worthy of storytelling as what the diagnosis does to Ella herself.
“I think, sadly, almost everyone has been touched by cancer, whether it’s by some degree of separation; it’s just so prevalent. Jeff and I both have friends and family members who have had cancer. Some of whom went through the treatment process and came out the other side, [the experience] just changed people,” Pollock told me in an interview late last month. “Oddly enough, in speaking to some of them, they said they almost cherish and value the experience, as terrible as treatment can be. They had dark, down moments, for sure. They almost said they would go back and do it again, to get to the point they were at in their lives.”
Captain Obvious would obviously say not everyone has battled cancer. Nonetheless, Pollock emphasized it was important to him and Hodsden to dramatize what Pollock described as a “universal idea.” Watching someone you love go through cancer is traumatic and disabling all its own—that level of commonality is what both men wanted to bring to life on the small screen.
“Not everyone has personal experience with cancer, but we’ve all had trauma and we’ve all dealt with hard things,” Pollock said. “We’ve all just lived through a pandemic in the last few years. [Rather than] letting something break you, you instead [let it push you into being] a better person: someone who appreciates every moment and is more present and doesn’t take anything for granted. We just thought that was such a great message and such a great basis for a story.”
Ella’s brother, Grady, personifies the cancer-affects-all idea. Without giving away too much storyline, Grady conjures up some mischievous schemes in order to divert attention from his sister onto him. As much as he cares for her—and he truly does, as you also see—it’s obvious Ella’s diagnosis has disabled Grady too, at least from a mental health standpoint. The notion that he’s ostensibly the “forgotten child” is examined in many ways, big and small, over the season.
Hodsden and Pollock explained the exploration of the perceived “jealousy” of someone like Grady was very much intentional. The creative team worked with charitable organization Teen Cancer America in order to speak to various people involved in the cancer life—families, nurses, and more—who could lend perspective on how cancer damages not only internal cells, but outside ones too.
“It just struck us as writers, how interesting that [watching a loved one endure treatment] was for complex characters [like Grady] that you can understand from multiple angles,” Pollock said. “Audiences can relate to, in a weird way, something that feels so odd, which is being jealous of someone who is sick.”
He added: “And the parents, we heard stories of just the agonizing decisions of one parent having to continue to work to support the family and pay for the medical bills, but how that sort of removes them from the experience and how that can drive a wedge within married couples. One parent who’s in the thick of it, and the other being removed from it—there’s so many complex issues and that makes [for] complex characters. For us as writers, the research we did, I feel like the more we knew we were on fertile ground [creatively]. We just thought that the real [life] stories were just so compelling that we did our best to transpose them onscreen.”
Working on Life By Ella has been “quite the journey,” according to Hodsden. He explained the show’s origins dates back about 5 years, when the pair first sold it. It was brought to Apple’s attention when TV+ was ramping up towards launch three years ago. Echoing other TV+ showrunners covered in this column in the past, Hodsden and Pollock emphasized how Apple was the perfecting landing place for their show. The company gave the creative team complete latitude to do what they wanted to do, with no meddling on how or where to push the show.
“I think Apple is, as [a group of] creative people, just the best partner because they’ve never once tried to shepherd us to a more marketable story or write away from the truth, [and] make it more accessible to children or anything like that,” Pollock said of working with the company. “From the start, they’ve encouraged us to do what was best for the show creatively and tell the real story. We just thought [Apple] was the best partner we could ask for in a business partner.”
As for their expectations, Hodsden and Pollock told me they’re proud to be among the other kids and family shows on TV+, and hope Life By Ella resonates with audiences. They want to show that cancer does not wholly define Ella; to show that her courage and zeal for life makes her a person is “my personal ultimate goal,” Pollock said. For Apple’s part, company executives who saw the series prior to its public release were “overwhelmed” by how good it is, Hodsden told me.
Hodsden concurred. “It’s everything Tim said, and also for me, it’s also just finding positive [traits in something] that can be so negative. I think in our world now, it’s easy to be negative all the time and just be down and be angry and be hateful. A character like [Ella] inspires you to say like, ‘You know, they go through such darkness and they can have that light. I could be a better person or my family could be better or I could be a better friend.’ I really hope that people can come out [watching the show] feeling good about themselves and feeling better about knowing that there are people in the world like this, and there’s good out there.”
The first season of Life By Ella is available in the TV app now.
