Long Island Medium's Theresa Caputo Reveals This Season's Most Emotional Reading - Exclusive

For more than 10 years, Theresa Caputo has been single-handedly driving up Kleenex sales with her series Long Island Medium. Fans (and even just casual channel-flippers) are already well aware that each episode is deeply emotional. In some ways, the series feels like being wrapped up in a warm blanket while you scroll through old family photos on your phone's camera roll. It's warm and a little bitter-sweet, but the show's newest season, which premiered on discovery+ on Friday, is really poised to open the floodgates — even for Caputo herself.

"I just want everyone to know ... know that I'm watching it, crying along with you," Caputo exclusively tells The List from a sunny living room in Long Island. "Because in the moment, I'm reading, I'm working. I don't see the episodes before they air. So I'm watching them for the first time like you are. So I'm bawling my eyes out right beside you."

When we sat down for a Zoom call on a chilly February afternoon, it wasn't too unlike an actual episode of her series. Like the rest of America, who have been stuck at home due to the on-going coronavirus pandemic, the star has been forced to turn toward video-chatting — not only to promote her new season, but also to film it. Long Island Medium: There In Spirit is entirely virtual and socially distant, but strangely enough, it led to some of the most emotional readings of Caputo's entire career. 

Here's what Caputo says fans can expect from her discovery+ debut, including the season's most emotional moment.

The pandemic actually presented a brand-new opportunity for Caputo. Unlike seasons past, where she was more or less limited to readings in the tri-state area, the medium was able to open up her services to people from any location. This included celebrities like Rosario Dawson, Meghan Trainor, Carmen Electra, and Backstreet Boys' Howie Dorough. "I was still in New York, they're in wherever they are, and we'd still be able to have the experience," she tells The List.

Brushing elbows with A-listers isn't new for the star. In recent years, Caputo has been hosting a number of celebrity readings, which pose a unique set of challenges. After years of dodging paparazzi and tabloid headlines, they're understandably a little guarded, but Caputo possesses a unique sympathy for those in the public eye. It's not hard for them to open up. 

"Of course we all know their names, but I don't really know anything about them," Caputo tells The List. "I don't know anything about their personal life, what they've lost, how they feel, what they're going through. And I think that's what people don't understand as well."

You'd think it'd be harder to hear a message through a virtual reading, but spirits aren't exactly bound by internet connectivity issues like the rest of us. One of the main things that surprised Caputo about working through the pandemic was how easy it actually was. As she puts it, Zoom was "the one silver lining," and it quickly became "the new phone reading," allowing her to share her gift worldwide.

"It still amazes me that, through Zoom, the emotion that you feel through all of the readings, that no pandemic was stopping spirit from delivering messages," she says. "It was a little different because you don't have that physical connection. I think that's something that all of us are missing for the past year, but watching Long Island Medium and watching these readings, you don't miss a beat on the emotion and the feeling. And that's the thing that I love the most about this season."

Pretty much all of humanity can agree that losing a loved one is terrible, but losing a loved one during the pandemic is a unique brand of awful. The virus has seemingly thwarted every typical avenue for closure. Goodbyes are said over FaceTime. Families stand apart at socially distanced funeral services. It's made Caputo's job more important than ever, and There In Spirit offers a unique moment of healing for a nation that's collectively grieving. In other words: this season is particularly emotional, but it also led Caputo to one of her most emotional readings. As Caputo describes to The List, the reading involved a family who lost a loved one to COVID-19. 

"They were unable to, of course, be with them," she says. "They didn't know what was happening. And the departed loved one came through and was saying all of these things, how the nurse would come in, hold her hand, and tell her all the things that her daughter was telling the nurses to tell her mom, and the songs that you would play, or talk to her and sit with her."

She continues, "I think that was the most moving moment for me this season, because it really showed us how nurses and doctors, healthcare providers, they really went above and beyond in a situation where no one had control and nobody really knew. And to get that validation for that woman was really touching. For her to say, 'Oh my God, I wondered if they did get the message. That's what the nurses and the doctors were telling me, but I didn't know. I wanted to believe it, but now I know I can, because there's no way that I would know those things.'"

Long Island Medium: There In Spirit is currently streaming on discovery+.