A new NBC comedy debuting this week looks set to take us back to the glory days of the network’s sitcoms like The Office and Scrubs.
St. Denis Medical, from Superstore and American Auto co-creators Justin Spitzer and Eric Ledgin, is a mockumentary about an understaffed and underfunded hospital in Oregon — a place where the dedicated doctors and nurses are trying their best to balance treating patients while maintaining their own sanity. It debuts on NBC on Nov. 12 at 8 pm ET, after which you’ll be able to stream the show on-demand via Peacock (here’s the show’s landing page).
I’ll be honest, I seriously miss the mockumentary and sitcom era of TV from the mid-2000s, a period that gave us gems like The Office, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Place. Streamers like Netflix, of course, have done much to pull away the network TV audience that would even be available to watch a show like St. Denis Medical, with Netflix offering a high volume of its own often low-quality shows in the process.
Be honest: When’s the last time you watched a quality sitcom from a streamer? Barring exceptions like Ted Lasso or Schitt’s Creek, they’re few and far between.
As for St. Denis Medical, it’s debuting with a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes (as of this writing). The cast includes Wendi McClendon-Covey as a sort of Michael Scott-like hospital administrator. It’s a hospital, she tells our sister publication The Wrap, “that’s kind of a safety hospital where they have to take everybody, whether you’re indigent or have no insurance. We’re the ones that catch everybody.”
And because of that fact, the hospital in this series is in a perpetual mode of fundraising.
The rest of the cast includes David Alan Grier, from Joe Pickett and In Living Color. Grier stars as ER doctor Ron, who’s also a down-on-his-luck divorcee. Rounding out the cast are Allison Tolman (Fargo, Good Girls), Josh Lawson (Superstore), Mekki Leeper (The Sex Life of College Girls), and Kahyun Kim (Cocaine Bear).
“It’s a great cast,” McClendon-Covey continues, in an interview you can watch below. “And I’m sorry, but hospitals are funny. They don’t mean to be, and they may not be funny if it’s happening to you … This would kind of be like The Office, but in a hospital setting
“My character is like: We’re a safety hospital now, but you give me five years and I will make this a destination hospital! People are going to come in from all over the West Coast to have their mammograms here! Meanwhile, they’re still using Windows 95.”
