“Hospitals are very sexy places.”
The seasoned TV viewer probably knows that; from “E.R.” to “Grey’s Anatomy” to “The Pitt,” fictional hospitals are always teeming with attractive people and tense relationships — which is what makes them such fruitful narrative territory. NBC’s “St. Denis Medical” is no exception, as the cast and creative team told IndieWire as part of a virtual panel for Universal Studio Group’s USG University.
“I always wondered: those medical dramas where people have sex in the on-call rooms, is that a real thing?” showrunner Eric Ledgin said. “My friend who’s an oncological surgeon assured me it’s a very real thing.”
That was the spark for Season 1, Episode 8 of the show, which opens with the St. Denis staff being summoned to a meeting after two of them are caught in the aforementioned on-call room. Hospital administrator Joyce (Wendi McLendon-Covey) hopes it’ll be a quick and efficient conversation, but it ends up opening the floodgates regarding sex, gossip, and more.
Watch the video of our interview above.
“It gets Alex (Allison Tolman) in her head about is she having enough sex in her marriage — which was something that was very relatable to me and many married people,” Ledgin said. “Then the room sort of piles on these ideas of, what if Joyce gets really paranoid that she’s not in the loop, and it just was such a funny point of view for that character. One by one, it all comes together in the room of how to turn this into a story about our characters.”
The break room is just one of many settings that showcase the work of production designer Elliot LaPlante, and how she and Ledgin worked to create “the level of hospital” that St. Denis would be from a visual standpoint.
“This was not a cold, inner city hospital, and that allowed us to have a little bit more charm and a little bit more of a community feel, while keeping the balance of feeling real,” said Ledgin. For LaPlante, the show’s Oregon setting took her back to her Pacific Northwest roots and to the atmosphere of that region.
“How do we bring the heart that we experience in these scripts to the visuals that we’re seeing, and how do we make it as authentic as possible?” she said. “What are those things that someone who is a medical professional will see and be like, ‘Oh my gosh, that is right on. We have that in our hospital.’ That’s what we were always looking to find in all of our sets.”
That extends to Joyce’s office, cluttered with memorabilia from her time at the hospital and clues about how much time she devotes to work (as much as she wants to have a richer life outside).
“She sometimes does feel removed from things, but we wanted to get out that reminder [that] she still is integral into everything that’s happening and has had such an impact on the community,” Laplante said.
“As we go on through the season, you just understand that Joyce is excluded from a lot of things, and it’s because she is a disaster of a person,” McLendon-Covey offered. “She sure wants to be a cuddly person, but she just isn’t. All her plants have to be fake, because she doesn’t have time to take care of them, and she has stuffed animals because those are her pets.”
She and Tolman expressed gratitude for the stability of something like “St. Denis.” The sets stay up, the departments have found their rhythm, and production rarely goes into overtime, making everyone “able to be fully present and able to be pleasant at work for every single hour of every single day, because we weren’t working crazy schedules, and we’re working these coveted sitcom hours,” Tolman said.
Even in a hospital, “St. Denis” is a workplace comedy, a genre now comfortably depicted in the single-camera mockumentary style. The handheld cameras require minimal set up (cutting down prep time for someone like Tolman, who usually counts on her quick memory to learn lines on set), and performers develop a relationship with their camera operators, who function as moving pieces of the scene like anyone else.
“Whatever brand of gentle psychosis it is where you go through your life as if there was an audience — I’ve had that since I was a kid,” Tolman said. “You can share things with the audience, and you can look at the camera and draw them in. There’s all these opportunities to make other jokes and have other reactions, and then we get to surprise each other, and we get to surprise our writers and our directors. It just keeps it really alive.”
Everyone from the “St. Denis” team was eager to praise other departments, from the camera crew and writing staff to costume designer Alex Hester, producer Meg A. Schave, and more. As they prepare for Season 2, there was palpable excitement about working on the show with so much established.
“Normally we build something that is for a season and then it comes down,” LaPlante said about her job specifically. “This set had to be waterproof. It had to be engineered. We built an ambulance bay with a 40-foot cantilevered awning, and we really had to be strategic throughout the Season of how we were able to shoot that area… I’m so glad it’s done. It’s ready to go for Season 2.”
For Ledgin, his years of experience as a writer and executive producer led him to being a full-fledged showrunner — on unexpected levels.
“I am a little surprised by how much I couldn’t get away from it, even when I went to sleep,” Ledgin said of the show’s first season, which is now streaming in full on Peacock. “It was in my dreams. I was waking up with an idea, and the problem was that I liked the idea so I had to actually get my phone and write it down. I was like, ‘This is going to save me an hour tomorrow then I’m banging my head against the wall trying to think about what it was…’ I think that was probably the biggest challenge that I am working on for Season 2.”
IndieWire partnered with Universal Studio Group for USG University, a series of virtual panels celebrating the best in television art from the 2024-2025 TV season across NBC Universal’s portfolio of shows. USG University (a Universal Studio Group program) is presented in partnership with Roybal Film & TV Magnet and IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking. Catch up on the latest USG University videos here or directly at the USG University site.
