Inside the success of ‘St. Denis Medical’: ‘If you’re a comedy and you’re not trying to make people laugh, I don’t think you’re doing it right’
Let's face it: We all need a good laugh — now more than ever.
“Laughing is one of the most fundamental, foundational human joys, if not the fundamental foundational joy,” says Eric Ledgin, showrunner and co-creator of St. Denis Medical, NBC's hit medical mockumentary. “So whatever the subject matter is, if you're a comedy and you're not at least trying to make people laugh, I don't think you're doing it right. And I think that audiences are really feeling the craving for that.”
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Ledgin recently took the stage at SXSW's Film & TV Festival alongside Universal Television's EVP of comedy development Jim Donnelly to chart the series' comedic creative journey in a panel titled "Pitch to Screen," moderated by Gold Derby's editor-in-chief.
Making people laugh, though, has become harder than ever. “Audiences are very savvy right now,” says Donnelly. “You’re not just competing with everything else that’s currently being produced, you’re competing with everything that’s ever been on television. So there’s pressure to give a little tweak in the foundation, to not repeat what someone else has done before. So I think people sometimes get a little too clever or cute, and they forget why an audience is coming to their show."
His advice: "If somebody else did it exactly the same way, find another way to do it.”
For St. Denis Medical, showrunner Ledgin admits the secret of the show’s success is “sometimes by luck, sometimes by effort.” But the most important element he keeps coming back to — “so I can continue doing this and then make another one,” he jokes — is simply tone. “I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer of what tone you want to go for, but I think it’s very helpful to know what works within it and what doesn’t,” he says. For him, “it’s not big setup, big punchline, it’s more like life when people are just being funny with each other at the end of the day.”
Admittedly, making medical situations funny is a risky proposition, so it was about marrying those funny ER stories that become dinner party fodder with a workplace comedy — “where they’re mad at someone who took their yogurt,” says Ledgin. “It felt like a very interesting contradiction for the difference between the stakes of those two experiences.”
That’s what appealed to Jim Donnelly when Ledgin brought in the pitch, along with series co-creator Justin Spitzer. “It really felt completely in the wheelhouse of what Universal Television does, not only hearkening back to the single camera comedies of The Office and Parks and Rec, but even going back further to Friends or Cheers,” Donnelly says. “It's a very well-formed ensemble with all these quirky, very specific different characters, but all with mutual respect of each other and a shared goal. So it has that sense of community, which I think is really important, at least for me, in terms of the comedies we produce.”
The trust between showrunner and executive also led to a change in the pilot script that proved fundamental to the show — giving Allison Tolman’s character, Alex, a family. “It just made the show better,” says Ledgin. “We had such a deeper well to go into with the character all season because of that change.”
Ledgin credits Abbott Elementary with reviving the mockumentary — “it brought the format back in vogue and made it cool again" — as well as Below Deck, which actively involves the producers in the storytelling. "There are some mockumentaries that let go of the premise pretty quickly and then you might see a shot and then see the reverse shot and there's no camera," hey says. "And you're like, oh, well, this isn't really a fake documentary because I would see the camera. We try to be really strict about that on the show.”
But ultimately, Ledgin and Donnelly says the show's magic comes from the strong ensemble. “You can cast the perfect people for the perfect role, but what you don’t know until the thing is on its feet is how they are going to interact,” says Donnelly. Allison Tolman was a “home run,” and Wendi McLendon-Covey turned into an “irresponsible cheerleader,” who when asked to improvise, did a cartwheel in heels.
And then there's Mekki Leeper (best known from Jury Duty), who tags lines at the end of scenes that often make it in because “they’re funnier than what we wrote, quite honestly,” says Ledgin.
While some of their storylines are ripped from the headlines — yes, there was a cat that gave someone in Oregon the plague — they draw the line at getting enmeshed in the politics of the day. “If anything, I feel like these shows can be a rare respite from that stuff,” says Ledgin.
Adds Donnelly, “I think that the goal of the show is that it should be something that people 10, 20, 50 years down the line can still watch and be relevant to their lives. And we don't know what way the world is changing. It is about those human stories which do somewhat reflect what's going on around the world, but without being so specific to the time so that it's irrelevant when times change."
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