SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “This Place Is Our Everything,” the Season 1 finale of NBC’s “St. Denis Medical,” now streaming on Peacock.
A big change is coming to St. Denis Medical, just as long as the ceiling doesn’t cave in.
All season, hospital executive director Joyce (Wendi McClendon-Covey) has gone to great lengths, often to the chagrin of her employees, to bring renown and resources to the Oregon hospital. But in the Season 1 finale, she took a major step in that direction, securing $10 million to further her plans, even though she immediately starts promising it away to the needs of others. But when she is sidelined by an injured ankle, she takes the quieter moment to confide in Ron (David Alan Grier) that she already has her own vision for the windfall –– to open a birthing center at St. Denis to make it the destination for expectant mothers and families outside of Portland.
“St. Denis Medical” co-creator and showrunner Eric Ledgins confirms to Variety this isn’t just another fleeting fantasy for Joyce, but rather the path forward for the titular hospital in the already-ordered Season 2. “I don’t think it’s giving anything away to say that when we come into Season 2, I’m very interested in exploring what happens when Joyce gets a little bit of what she wants and is able to run with it,” he says.
The idea for the birthing center was originally pitched in the writers’ room as a timely means of bringing young families and new faces to the hospital next season. But it is also one to which Ledgins was able to bring some personal experience.
“My wife did what’s now become known as a ‘non-traditional birth,’ but I guess it’s like the original traditional birth, which is to say at home with nothing,” he says. “We met with a lot of midwives during the process of finding the right person. She had a doula, and it’s all this stuff that is both in the zeitgeist to me, but also just really fascinating for the medical field. Birthing centers feel like this great meeting of medicine and tradition, and so it just felt potentially interesting for the show.”
Wendi McLendon-Covey, David Alan Grier
Courtesy of Ron Batzdorff/NBC
A new venture of this magnitude is also something that will help Joyce channel all of her bombastic energy because, as Ledgins puts it, “birthing centers by nature can have personality. They can have suites that have themes in them and hot tubs or little pools, and just things that are a little more fun to plan out and make choices for than just your typical, sterile department.”
While Joyce may be getting what she wants, her unyielding commitment to the hospital inadvertently inspires supervising nurse Alex (Allison Tolman) finally to focus on the often-neglected half of her own work-life balance. In the finale, Alex is technically off duty to accompany her husband Tim (Kyle Bornheimer) to his vasectomy. But a rainstorm causes major staff shortages and maintenance issues (the aforementioned ceiling issues included), all of which pull a reluctant Alex into the chaos. During the unexpected shift, she tends to a hobbled Joyce, who tells Alex that they are the same person because “this place is our everything” and they can’t say no to it. With that chilling realization, Alex hands the reins over to Serena (Kahyun Kim) and rejoins Tim just in time for the big snip.
While this is definitely progress for workaholic Alex, Ledgins cautions that lifestyle changes aren’t made in a day and she won’t suddenly be a new woman in Season 2.
“I certainly don’t want to reset her to the beginning, like she learned nothing,” he says. “But I think it’s also true that, as someone who shares certain qualities with Alex, a lot of times you tell yourself, ‘Now, I got it.’ But like, you never really got it. So it’s probably true that the same things that were causing her to maybe run into some problems are just going to manifest in different ways.”
Mekki Leeper, Kahyun Kim
Courtesy of Ron Batzdorff/NBC
One thing that is poised to change immediately in Season 2 is the dynamic between Serena and Matt (Mekki Leeper). Since the series premiere, Matt has harbored a crush on the former traveling nurse, who hasn’t picked up on the hints –– though everyone else has. But when Serena playfully tries to suss out what kind of girl Matt likes this week, a frustrated Val (Kaliko Kauahi) spills the beans. While the two don’t acknowledge the suddenly exposed crush in the finale, Ledgins says he and the writing team have already begun crafting the Season 2 premiere and won’t dance around the new development.
“First and foremost, that’s definitely the story we’re tracking romance-wise, and it started out as this little crush where we could have decided the right thing to do was for him to just get over it very quickly and move on,” Ledgins says. “I didn’t want to force it. I didn’t want to do a paint-by -numbers ‘Will they won’t they?’ But it felt really fun to have it largely exist in Matt’s mind for Season 1, and now I am happy that we moved it forward in the finale and it feels really right to address that pretty directly in the premiere. So there will be an update on that as soon as we come back.”
As for what else audiences might see in the new season, which will also be 18 episodes, the sky’s the limit for the crew of St. Denis. One evolution will be seeing more of the home lives of the staff, though Ledgins admits that is a slippery slope.
“I do want to get out of the hospital for a couple of episodes this season, and we have some fun stuff planned,” he says. “But in terms of actually going home with people, it feels like once you do that, now we’re in a world where the crews are following them home and expanding the whole show of the fake documentary. So I want to earn that a little bit more. There’s still so many stories to tell within the confines of the hospital.”
Speaking of the documentary crew, would the show ever explain why St. Denis is being observed by cameras? Again, Ledgins has some hesitations. In his mind, he envisions the documentary as something that would air in a country fascinated by the American healthcare system. “I considered at one point having an offscreen producer voice being like Australian or Swedish or something that just felt like this isn’t necessarily airing here.”
But he also thinks it doesn’t necessarily need explanation. Twenty years after shows like “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation” popularized the mockumentary format, audiences are now trained to just go with it. If anything, Ledgins hopes that if the crew ever makes its on-screen debut, it won’t be by his design.
“I’ve always said, if we catch someone by accident, we should feel good using that,” he says. “That’s OK! I didn’t want to do it on purpose. If it happens, it happens. But then again, our crew is so good that it never happens. It almost bums me out. I want them to be clumsier.”
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