Eric Ledgin believes the soul of St. Denis Medical isn’t the broken health care system the characters work in, but their calling and connection, which help them go to work and survive another day.
In an exclusive interview with Where Is The Buzz ahead of the premiere of the third season of the comedy, which airs on NBC and Peacock on November 2 at 8 p.m., Ledgin shared his thoughts on the humor in burnout, the characters’ growth, and the plague storyline that has become one of his favorites.
The mockumentary comedy features the lives of the exhausted doctors and nurses working in an underfunded hospital in Oregon. Damon Wayans joins the cast as a pretentious doctor in the third-season premiere, reuniting with his former co-star from In Living Color, David Alan Grier. Tony Hawk, Martha Kelly, Jon Barinholtz, and Jimmy Smits also appear as guest stars this season, and Ariana Madix returns as heart surgeon Dr. Brooke Emerson.
After watching screeners, I started thinking about the reality hidden behind the comedy. I asked Eric Ledgin about how St. Denis Medical makes us laugh about a broken system without disrespecting the people working there.
“Well, it’s a good question,” Ledgin said. “I think often when you’re in these places, and I say these places, but every hospital is different, and we are specifically focused on a hospital that’s not in a very busy city where there’s constant churn and some really dark things happening. It’s a hospital that’s in a bit of a more sparsely populated region. And so there are slower days, and there are times that funny things happen.”
Although burnout is a fact, people have learned to cope with it.
“So I think when you’re in one of these places, and you look around, you talk to people, we think of these systems and that there’s a lot of burnout in the system,” he said. “But what you’re looking at when you’re in one of these places is just people getting through the day. And often getting through that day, for a lot of people that are doing it successfully, they’re doing it because they’re able to laugh and they’re able to find what’s funny about it.”
Ledgin admitted that writers did not set the message of the series on purpose.
“It’s not an intentional message of the show, but I think that there is sort of an inherent takeaway that is very in line with my personal belief, which is that no matter how challenging things are, no matter how broken they might seem, we are not broken,” he said. “The people are just doing their best to have a good experience in this life.”
The third season reveals more humanity in the characters. Ron and Joyce become more vulnerable, and Matt and Serena enter a new stage of their relationship. I asked Eric Ledgin about how he can develop a character without losing the flaws that are the source of humor.
“That’s a really good question, and it really is a balance, because you don’t want to tell the same story over and over,” Ledgin said. “There’s a lot of dynamics that feel like what’s funny about the character is that they don’t change, the way people don’t change. They make the same mistakes over and over, and I think there is something inherently funny and true about that. But it’s also the case that over time people do learn and grow, so to an extent they do change, right? So it’s just a balance.”
He added that writers try to show small believable changes instead of total transformations.
“Especially season to season or within a season, if something really specific and moving happens to someone, you want to see that maybe they haven’t fully changed and done a 180 from who they were,” he said. “But maybe instead of 180, they’ve done a three. They’ve done a three-degree change in the trajectory of their life. And so we try to honor that as much as possible.”
Ledgin mentioned the show’s development process, which helped the writers keep the characters true.
“It’s helpful to have the process we have of getting the studio and network’s eyes on scripts and doing table reads and talking to the actors about their character,” he said. “It really helps to clarify: does this make sense given what we know about this character?”
Not all series are so open to discussing characters, so I asked Ledgin whether that openness affects the actors’ performance.
“I’ve tried to create a very collaborative environment on set, and I hope all the actors know that they can come to me at any time and say, ‘Hey, I have a question about this thing that my character is doing because it feels a little bit out of line with what I feel I know about them,'” Ledgin said. “And then we can have the conversation and either decide why it’s worth trying or decide why there’s a little change that can make it feel right.”
At its core, “St. Denis Medical” revolves around people who choose to spend their lives caring for others at their own expense. So I asked Ledgin if his comedy is actually a criticism of how society treats people.
“Man, that’s a really good question, and I have thought a lot about it,” he replied. “I feel like a lot of this show is about a calling and a passion, and what that does to you and what it creates in your life, because I think most of the characters working at this hospital feel called to it to some degree. It’s not just something that they picked out of a hat.
“And so that passion, and whatever troubles it might bring, I feel like often we’re finding in the show that the antidote to those problems is connection. And so I would say that this show is largely about calling and connection.”
Finally, I asked Eric Ledgin about the storyline that at first seemed too serious for the workplace comedy, but ended up becoming one of the most important to tell. His answer started with a news headline.
“This is going to be a weird answer to that, because it doesn’t seem serious as a storyline necessarily,” he said. “But I saw this news article that someone had gotten the plague in Oregon from being scratched by a cat. And you hear plague, and you think serious. You think, ‘This is bad. This could end our society.’ But then you look it up, and you’re like, ‘No, they can fix the plague now. It’s just some antibiotics.'”
“So that was one that felt like, OK, we’ll do our plague story,” Ledgin said. “And it ended up being one of my favorite ones.”
The first two seasons of St. Denis Medical are streaming on Peacock.
