New mockumentary hospital comedy St. Denis Medical channels The Office and Parks and Rec
St. Denis Medical is about to open for patients — and for viewers.
Once the home of the hit series Scrubs, NBC gets back into the business of hospital comedies. Using a cinéma vérité style, St. Denis Medical takes the form of a mockumentary about an Oregon facility struggling with many of the problems so many hospitals are facing — particularly when it comes to shortages of staff and funding.
If the show’s approach seems similar to former NBC projects Superstore and American Auto, there’s a good reason: it was created by two of the same producers from those series, Justin Spitzer and Eric Ledgin.
The ensemble cast of St. Denis Medical includes Wendi McLendon-Covey (The Goldbergs) as the site’s ex-surgeon executive director, Tony Award-winner David Alan Grier (In Living Color) as an emergency-department doctor and Allison Tolman (Fargo) as a supervising nurse. Also featured are Josh Lawson (House of Lies), Mekki Leeper (Jury Duty), Kahyun Kim (Cocaine Bear) and Superstore alum Kaliko Kauahi.
“There’s this sort of middle area that we’re finding,” Ledgin explains of the St. Denis Medical style, “where someone is saying something half to the camera, half to a patient or a co-worker, and it just gives you so many different layers to play with . . . different layers of the characters, and we’re lucky enough to have seven series regulars that are all just killer actors and can do every one of those levels in a different, interesting way. I would say that even though there are some limitations to the format at times, you get a lot more benefit and a lot more to play with comedically. And from a storytelling perspective, too.”
For McLendon-Covey, who also went the mockumentary route in Comedy Central’s Reno 911!, that strategy fits what she desired in and from a series after playing family matriarch Beverly Goldberg for a decade in The Goldbergs.
“All I wanted was to not play another mom right away,” she says. “I think it’s well documented that I can play moms, and with respect to all moms everywhere, what I loved about this character is that she is not nurturing at all. Don’t come near her wanting a hug. She does not want your germs, and she cannot keep a plant alive, but she is devoted to this hospital. That’s her baby, and this is her whole personality. The fact that this came along right at the tail end of The Goldbergs, I’m the luckiest person in the world. I was not being strategic necessarily. I just knew I didn’t want to be [playing someone] in the ’80s again, and this was just such a gift.”
Co-star Grier maintains that he was also reasonably flexible in returning to series work. “My goal is always to say ‘Yes’ to a good script,” he reasons. “It just happened that I was [going to play] a doctor. There are some characters that you read and you think, ‘I can reach that or get to that.’ This guy, he’s an old curmudgeon. That’s me. It wasn’t the medical stuff; that was incidental. I just responded to the script, and — and I say this begrudgingly — it was good. It was well written. It was intelligent.”
A Primetime Emmy nominee for the first season of FX’s Fargo, Tolman has earned acclaim for offbeat projects that also have included ABC’s Downward Dog and the Paramount+ (then-CBS All Access) series Why Women Kill. She believes St. Denis Medical extends that tradition for her.
“I find something really charming about the mundane in the most extreme circumstances,” she reflects. “Everyone who is visiting the hospital is in extreme circumstances, but as extreme as they are, they’re not extreme for [the staff]. It’s just another day, and someone has a day off [or it’s] somebody’s birthday, and I find that really charming. Every episode has a moment where that sort of sincerity and that heartfelt core shine through. I think we’re really lucky in that way.”
Also a producing veteran of NBC’s The Office, Spitzer wrote for Scrubs. While he expresses affection for that medical comedy, he reflects that “it had more wacky elements … marching bands coming through, or a musical episode. It was great in so many ways, but the fact that [St. Denis Medical] is a mockumentary sort of limits us and says we are always going to be the much more grounded version.”
Though he and Spitzer were working on another series concept, Ledgin claims that once St. Denis Medical entered their thought process, they were all in on it. “It was very exciting to start talking about it,” recalls Ledgin, “and to see how all these characters and even story ideas just were kind of spilling out of us early on, which is just the best test — [something] coming easy. That’s a good thing.”
St. Denis Medical premieres Tuesday, November 12, on NBC & CTV