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What 'The Midnight Club' Gets Right — and Skips — About Terminally Ill Teens
Netflix's 'The Midnight Club' imagines terminally ill teenagers telling stories at a hospice called Brightcliffe. Here's how that compares to real adolescent and young adult palliative care — and why thyroid cancer, Ilonka's diagnosis, is usually far more treatable than the show suggests.
A plain-language summary based on public reporting and trusted sources, linked below.
Please note: this page is educational only — it is not medical advice, and it does not speculate about anyone’s health beyond reliable public reporting. For questions about your own health, talk with your healthcare team.
On screen
"The Midnight Club" premiered on Netflix on October 7, 2022. Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong created it. It was based on Christopher Pike's 1994 novel of the same name. It also drew on dozens of his other books.
The show follows Ilonka, played by Iman Benson. She is a teenager with thyroid cancer. Standard treatment fails, so she goes looking for an unusual cure. She moves into Brightcliffe, a hospice-like home near Seattle. There she meets seven other dying young residents. Each night at midnight, they gather to tell scary stories. They make a pact: whoever dies first will try to send a sign from the other side. The show was canceled after one season.
But its main image stayed with viewers. A group of dying teens choose, night after night, to be there for each other through fiction.
The reality
Hospice and palliative care for adolescents and young adults (AYAs) is real. It is also badly underserved. The National Cancer Institute says about 85,000 AYAs get a cancer diagnosis in the U.S. each year. These are people diagnosed between ages 15 and 39. They fall between pediatric and adult cancer care. Neither system was built with them in mind. Cancer at that age breaks things a diagnosis at 60 does not. It interrupts school, first jobs, new independence, dating, and fertility. It interrupts the work of figuring out who you are. NCI says this causes real isolation. Young patients are often surrounded by people decades older. They lack peers who understand what they are going through.
A live-in hospice just for teens, like Brightcliffe, is mostly a plot device. It is not common in real life. Most AYA hospice and palliative care in the U.S. happens in other ways. It happens through home-based hospice programs. It happens through pediatric palliative care teams inside hospitals. A small number of AYA units also exist. Standalone residential homes are rare. But the show gets the feelings right. It shows grief, fear, the wish to matter, and the need for people your own age who get it. That matches what clinicians and researchers see in real AYA patients.
Ilonka's diagnosis needs a closer look. The show could mislead people about thyroid cancer. The most common types are papillary and follicular. NCI says these "can be treated and usually cured." A small share are poorly differentiated or anaplastic thyroid cancer. Those grow fast and have a worse outlook. Terminal thyroid cancer in a teen is possible but rare. Thyroid cancer is common in AYAs, ages 15 to 39, and most so at 30 to 39. That is because it is often caught and treated well. Fiction needs dying characters. The real numbers for thyroid cancer usually do not go that way.
Why community and story matter
Where the show is on firmer ground is its instinct that storytelling and peer community function as real coping tools. Research and clinical experience in pediatric and AYA palliative care consistently point to the value of narrative. Patients make sense of illness, fear, and identity by telling stories, whether about themselves or invented characters. They also point to the value of peer groups where young patients don't have to explain themselves from scratch. Programs bring together AYA patients. There are camps built around shared diagnosis experience. There is even structured storytelling or art therapy in hospital and hospice settings.
These exist because clinicians have seen how much they help with the isolation NCI describes. The Midnight Club's nightly ritual is a heightened, horror-genre version of something real: shared narrative as a way to hold grief and fear at a survivable distance, together.
What to keep in perspective
- Most thyroid cancer, especially the common papillary and follicular subtypes, is highly treatable — a terminal case like Ilonka's is the less typical outcome, not the expected one.
- Residential teen hospices like Brightcliffe are a dramatic device; most AYA palliative and hospice care in the U.S. happens at home or through hospital-based programs.
- Peer community and storytelling are genuine, evidence-informed coping supports in pediatric and AYA palliative care — the show's central idea has real clinical grounding even where its plot is fictional.
Sources
- National Cancer Institute, "Thyroid Cancer" (cancer.gov/types/thyroid)
- National Cancer Institute, "Adolescents and Young Adults with Cancer" (cancer.gov/types/aya)
- Wikipedia, "The Midnight Club (TV series)"
How this article was prepared
An AI-assisted editorial system helped prepare this page. No named medical reviewer has reviewed it unless one is listed.
Cancer Explained is published by the National Cancer Information Foundation. It is not medical advice and does not suggest a test or treatment.
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Prevention, possible warning signs, screening, and diagnosis
This story relates to Thyroid cancer; adolescent and young adult hospice care. The information below is general: it does not reveal anything else about a public person’s health, and not every point applies to every cancer. Personal advice depends on age, symptoms, family history, exposures, and medical history.
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