‘The Resident’: Most Tragic Episode Was Based on True Story

The Resident has touched on many important topics throughout its run, but a 2019 episode was a heartbreaker that highlighted the maternal mortality rate among Black women in the U.S. “If Now Now, When?,” which aired in April 2019, was inspired by the story of Kira Johnson, who died in childbirth at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles in April 2016. Her widower, Charles Johnson, has been a tireless advocate for raising awareness of the issue and worked closely with The Resident writers to bring an authentic fictional version of Johnson’s story to television.

“Truthfully, we’re trying to take an issue that’s very important and personalize it with one story – because that’s how people can understand them,” The Resident co-creator Amy Holden Jones told The Root in April 2019. “When you’re just throwing statistics, people don’t understand. Put a face to it, put a story to it, and you begin to see a situation, a wrong that needs to be righted, and something that can be done.”

Charles drew the attention of Fox executives when he testified in Congress to support the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act, which became law in December 2018. After talking with then-Fox VP of Programming, Reena Singh, he met with The Resident writers to talk them through the events of April 12, 2016, when Johnson died. He also discussed the impact her death had on their family and what caused it. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 861 women died of maternal causes in the U.S., and the maternal mortality rate for 2020 was 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births. The mortality rate for non-Hispanic Black women was 55.3 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020.

“Much to their credit, we had a very candid conversation about the racial disparities and the role that I felt race played [in Kira’s death], and how I feel that biases are a contributing factor across the board to women of color,” Charles told The Root. “And so I was so fortunate, this is not something where they just took our story and ran with it.”

Charles said he was not aware himself of the number of Black women dying after childbirth in the U.S., so he liked the idea of working with a television show to raise awareness of the issue. “I am very much a private person. I don’t particularly like the spotlight,” Charles said in 2019. “And just to be quite honest with you, I didn’t know if sharing our story was the right thing to do. But I knew I had to do something when I realized that we were smack in the middle of this maternal mortality crisis.”

Three years after The Resident episode aired, Charles is still telling his wife’s story. He established the nonprofit 4Kira4Moms, through which he helps more families share their experiences of loss during childbirth or from childbirth complications. “First and foremost, we advocate,” Charles told Parents in October 2022. “We try and become a voice for the voiceless. There are so many families that have been suffering in silence and don’t have the platform, and these stories are going unnoticed. We try and give a voice to that and advocate for change.”

Johnson was 39 when their second son, Langston, was born. She had a scheduled cesarean section, and Langston was born healthy. But Charles noticed his wife’s catheter turned pink with blood. Doctors called for a CT scan, but it was not performed for several hours. A nurse told Charles that his wife was not a “priority” at that moment. Finally, she was later taken to an operating suite, but it was too late. She was left for over 10 hours with a hemorrhage bleeding into her abdomen. She lost about 70% of her circulating blood volume while they waited for doctors to finally help her. Charles told Parents he is still having nightmares.

“I sit up at night and I struggle. What should I have done differently?” he said. “Should I have yelled, should I have grabbed a doctor by the collar? But that is the reality of our lived experience.” He later told the outlet that no matter what he does with his sons, there is “nothing that can fill that gap when your child wakes up in the middle of the night asking why mommy can’t come home.”

All episodes of The Resident, including “If Not Now, When?,” are streaming on Hulu. The show is now in its sixth season and airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.