Jamison Hill
Overview
Baffling symptoms. Controversial diagnoses. Costly treatments. Seven people with chronic illnesses search for answers -- and relief.
Seasons
- Status
- Ended
- Seasons
- 1 season
- Episodes
- 7 episodes
- First aired
- Aug 10, 2018
Cast
Reviews
4 min readThe Body as a Crime Scene
I didn’t expect to spend seven hours watching people’s bodies betray them. Not in the way of a hospital drama, where the stakes are life or death and the narrative arc is clear—diagnosis, treatment, recovery, or tragedy. No, Afflicted is something stranger: a documentary series about chronic illness as a mystery without resolution, a puzzle where the pieces keep shifting.
It’s less about answers than about the exhausting, often humiliating search for them. And by the end, I wasn’t sure if I’d been watching a medical investigation or a horror story.
The series follows seven individuals—Jamison, Carmen, Jake, Star, Pilar, Jill, and Bekah—as they navigate conditions that defy easy explanation: Lyme disease, mold toxicity, electromagnetic hypersensitivity, chronic fatigue syndrome. Their symptoms are real, debilitating, and, crucially, invisible. That invisibility is the first obstacle.
Doctors dismiss them. Friends and family grow skeptical. Even the camera, which should be an impartial witness, sometimes feels like an accomplice in the doubt.
The series doesn’t just document their suffering; it mirrors the frustration of being doubted when your pain is the only thing you can’t escape.
What makes Afflicted so unsettling is its refusal to play by the rules of medical storytelling. There’s no triumphant diagnosis, no miracle cure, no third-act revelation that ties everything together. Instead, the series lingers in the ambiguity, the dead ends, the moments when hope flickers and gutters out.
Take Jamison Hill, a former bodybuilder whose muscles waste away as he searches for a diagnosis. In one scene, he lies in bed, his once-powerful frame now frail, and talks about how his doctors have stopped returning his calls. The camera doesn’t cut away.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsThey dropped the suit. The series stayed up.
In June 2023, the people Netflix put on camera in Afflicted asked a Los Angeles judge to dismiss their defamation case with prejudice. Deadline reported the papers did not say why, or whether money changed hands. The Hollywood Reporter called it a settlement. Terms never published. latestnetflix.com's take is that the seven-episode Doc Shop series had been sitting on the service since August 10, 2018.It is still the same pitch. Baffling symptoms. Controversial diagnoses. Costly treatments. 
, 
,
Nine days later they published the outtakes.
The show follows seven patients. Jamison Hill had not left his room in two years. Bekah Dinnerstein, also called Bekah Fly in later interviews, was living in a van in the desert to avoid mold. Jill Edelstein, Pilar Olave, and others chase diagnoses that range from myalgic encephalomyelitis to chemical sensitivity. Nine days after premiere, several of them posted a Medium letter. They said producers promised a compassionate lens. They said the cut framed their conditions as psychosomatic. Jill wrote, "I trusted you with my heart and my story, and now you are using it against me and my people." , ,
Bekah told HuffPost she asked the question out loud before she signed. "Is this going to be a slant of where you have a bunch of doctors calling patients crazy?" She said Dan Partland and Peter Logreco told her no. Jamison said producers promised the series would help the cause. Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease physician interviewed for the show, told HuffPost his 90-minute sit-down shrank to under 30 seconds.
Dunham signed. The court voided the releases.
September 2018, an open letter to Ted Sarandos and Lisa Nishimura asked Netflix to pull the series. Lena Dunham, Monica Lewinsky, Jennifer Brea, and a Nobel laureate were among the names. The letter said the cut advanced a psychological theory the evidence did not support. Partland told The Hollywood Reporter he was saddened. "Our intention was to give the world a compassionate window into the difficulties of patients and families suffering from elusive and misunderstood illnesses." A source told THR Netflix had no plan to remove it.
In 2019, Hill, Olave, Edelstein, Dinnerstein, and three relatives sued for defamation, fraud, and false light. They said they were duped into "a salacious reality television program" that painted them as "lazy, crazy hypochondriacs." Netflix pointed to signed releases. In April 2022 the Second Appellate District said those releases were not enforceable. The panel wrote that producers Peter LeGreco and Stephanie Lincoln treated the paperwork as a formality, and that the show could be read as implying the patients were imagining their illnesses. The case died the next year. The episodes did not. , ,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.