NOW ENTERTAINMENT Nov. 10 Month 00- -16, 00,2024 2023
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NBC launches a new hospital comedy with the premiere of “St. Denis Medical” Tuesday, Nov. 12.
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The cast of “St. Denis Medical”
Cover Story Checking in: NBC introduces new hospital comedy ‘St. Denis Medical’ By Jay Bobbin A new hospital 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 with “St. Denis Medical,” premiering on the nework and streaming on Peacock Tuesday, Nov. 12. Using a cinema verite style, the show 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,” 2023) and “Superstore” alum Kaliko Kauahi. 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 ABC’s “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
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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.” Fellow “St. Denis Medical” 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.” 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.”
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