“St. Denis Medical” has been one of the freshest, funniest new comedies of the 2024-2025 TV season, and its co-creators and cast know why: It’s deeply rooted in truth. Creator, showrunner, and writer Eric Ledgin even did his own research to find out if hospital staff really do have sex in the on-call rooms, as shown on so many TV medical dramas.
Ledgin was joined by co-creator and writer Justin Spitzer and actors Wendi McLendon-Covey, Allison Tolman, Josh Lawson, Mekki Leeper, and Kaliko Kauahi for an IndieWire Consider This Live Event moderated by actress D’Arcy Carden at Vidiots Foundation in Los Angeles’s Eagle Rock neighborhood on May 29. This was an official TV Academy FYC event.
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Watch the full panel above.
The theme of the evening kept coming back to truth. In fact, the very idea for the show came from some real-life experiences Ledgin had over the years.
“I had had a few experiences throughout my life, either as a patient or as the friend or loved one of a patient in the middle of the night at some rural hospital or in a city hospital,” Ledgin said. “And the thing that surprised me the most about all those experiences is that there were funny things that always happen, whether they were funny because they were awkward or just breaking tension. And that felt real to me.”
For her part, McLendon-Covey also based the attitude of Joyce, the administrator she plays and is always trying to improve and advance her underfunded Oregon hospital, on her own experience giving the hard sell for a crummy hotel she once worked at, or as she put it, “the third worst Ramada in Anaheim.”
“The way we were trying to push that stupid hotel uphill in front of us is the way that Joyce is trying to push St. Denis uphill,” McLendon-Covey said. “If I can just get a birthing center or something in this rural hospital, people will stop going to Turkey. They’re going to come to rural Oregon, they’re going to stop going to Tijuana for their nose jobs. They’re going to come here if I just get more Japanese maples. She’s not stupid!”
For the best format to convey the comedic truth of this setup, Ledgin and Spitzer turned to the mockumentary.
“I think so much of the funniest stuff for me is what feels real, or at least like the building of that tension of something,” Ledgin said. “Feeling like you’re right there and there’s just no better format to do that than being a fly on the wall of something that’s supposed to be really happening.”
As Tolman puts it, “Wendi always says very wisely that the best thing about mockumentary comedy is that there’s jokes between the lines because your reactions are a punchline and you kind of get to find them yourself, which I think is very true. I’ve always loved mockumentaries because I like that it’s such a perfect blend of really deep, true, grounded acting and the dumbest, the dumbest scenarios you can find.”
For his part, Leeper noted that the “talking head” direct-to-camera segments in the mockumentary format are similar to standup and involve a real interactivity for the writers, which results in a deeper mining of the material.
“You just get to do stand-up to just the camera,” Leeper said. “I think the most fun thing is when the writers are hitting you with alts in between recording. I like the ‘talking heads.’ It’s like you’ll have the paragraph or whatever it is, and then sometimes it’s fun how collaborative it gets because they’ll give you a full new thing [to say] where none of the words are the same at all, and you kind of just have to be like, all right, I’m going to try to do this as close as I can. And I think that’s where it most feels like you’re kind playing around with the writers, which is really a privilege on a show like this. I don’t know, on a drama if you get that kind of interplay as much.”
Leeper notes that some of the most truthful moments in “St. Denis Medical” come from a deep well of experience.
“I think the show is so good,” he said, “because almost all of our crew are people that worked on ‘Superstore’ and then worked on ‘American Auto.’ So it’s like 12 years of experience that make the show really good.”
“[Ledgin and Spitzer] got to know me over the course of ‘Superstore’ and were like, she’s more Val [her character on ‘St. Denis Medical’] than Sandra [her ‘Superstore’ character], so we’ll just slot her in there and see what happens. If we ask my family about Val, they think I’m not acting. Which I think is false because as Val, I am playing a character. But she’s much more — I’m going to say grounded, she keeps the hospital grounded.”
The “Superstore” influence is conscious on Spitzer’s part. “I feel like when you have a really talented group and people that you like and they’re easy to work with, why not use ’em as much as possible?” he said of bringing back “Superstore” actors. “I’m always pushing ‘Superstore,’ and Josh Lawson was in a number of episodes, too.”
Lawson, as Bruce, has a particular challenge in taking on a very familiar comedic archetype: The Confident Idiot.
“It’s so fun to play the Confident Idiot,” Lawson said. “There’s such a long history of that in art and literature, from Don Quixote to Falstaff. There’s such a great paradigm for a character like that. But I think it became clear that Bruce could get away with so much because his insecurities were so obvious to everyone but him.”
Maybe if not venturing into Bruce territory, the “St. Denis Medical” team should be very confident themselves: Confident in their ability to make us laugh.
Watch the video of the full panel above.
IndieWire’s Consider This Conversations bring together the cast and creative team members of TV’s most prestigious titles to discuss the best of television art and craft in 2025.
