How ‘St. Denis Medical’ Became the Comedy Hit We Need Right Now

When we first spoke with Wendi McLendon-Covey, who stars in NBC’s new series St. Denis Medical, it was August at the Television Critics Association press tour. The comedy’s conspicuous release date came up in conversation: Nov. 12, a week after what was widely predicted to be a contentious election with a stress-inducing tail that could possibly drag on for days, if not weeks. “I think people might need a laugh!” she told me then.

When we check in again the week of the election, she’s self-effacing, yet searingly accurate, about the power of that laugh. “I wasn’t put here on the planet to, you know, be a scientist and fight infectious diseases, or save the world in any other capacity,” she said. “But I can at least entertain and make people forget their problems for 22 minutes.”

The people, it turns out, are grateful.

St. Denis Medical was the most-watched NBC premiere in two years. All viewership metrics these days are touted with dizzying caveats—in this case, it’s the most-watched premiere without a NFL lead-in to goose ratings—but the takeaway is the same: People are gladly tuning in. That premiere audience even grew 85 percent in seven days.

Set in a suburban Oregon hospital, St. Denis Medical is a mockumentary-style series from the creators of workplace comedies Superstore and American Auto. It echoes the sweetness and madcap humor of those series, depicting the stress, outrageousness, and familial bond that happens among colleagues—but with the familiar mockumentary format beloved in comedies like The Office, Modern Family, and Abbott Elementary.

Critics hailed the way the series balances the high-stakes hijinks of a hospital environment and a gratifying sharp, smart, semi-sarcastic wit with a feel-good tone that is, it goes without saying, in high demand these days. That’s all buoyed by a cast with electric comedic chemistry, led by McLendon-Covey (The Goldbergs, Bridesmaids), Allison Tolman (Fargo, Emergence), and David Alan Grier (In Living Color, Martin, a bazillion projects).

For my part, it’s the show when, in recent weeks, people have asked or messaged me, “Please, what should I be watching right now?”—as if I have a magic button that opens a trap door to the escapism they need—I’ve been pointing them towards St. Denis Medical. It’s certainly done the job for me.

So, now that it’s firmly in its groove, I spoke with McLendon-Covey, Tolman, and Grier about the role the show is playing right now, adhering to and overcoming The Office comparisons, and, more simply, just what makes it work.

“I am…I wanted to say a middle-aged man, but, no, I’m old now,” David Alan Grier told me. “During the pandemic, I, an old black man from Detroit, watched Downton Abbey with such fervor, because it took me out of my world completely. White English people living it up in a big castle. I was like, ‘Let me get more!’ So, that is needed for all of us right now.”

Grier plays the hospital’s veteran ER doctor, Ron, who wishes everyone around him would dial back the self-generated chaos by at least 90 percent. If you’re familiar with the mockumentary format, it’s his to-camera, exasperated expressions and mugging that often punctuate the series’ biggest laughs. (He calls those his “Lenox Hill takes,” inspired by another one of his pandemic obsessions, the docuseries Lenox Hill, set in the famed New York City hospital.)

Comparisons to The Office are expected, and have been employed often. It’s an easy descriptor for a mockumentary comedy, like a Mad Libs for the genre: “It’s The Office, but in a _____,” be it “school” for a series like Abbott Elementary, “government office” for Parks and Recreation, or, now, “hospital” for St. Denis Medical. It’s an understandable, if, as one of the cast members told me, “kind of irritating” sell for the series, which is benefitting from the branding but hopes to stand on its own.

So a recent post Grier saw on social media was a relief, he said, confirming to him that the show was working on its own merits. “They said, ‘I like the show because it’s good, honest laughs.’ I just want to be truthful, honest, and not try and goose that f---ing punchline. Let it come to you.”

Tolman plays Alex, a workaholic nurse who can’t let go over her sense of duty to the hospital—often at the expense of her home life. When we spoke, it was just after the show’s Nov. 12 premiere. She understood the impulse to seek out comfort entertainment—she’d been doing the same.

“The night of the election, I started watching Parks and Recreation again, because I was like, I just want something comfy and funny, but sweet, like with almost no edge to it,” she told me. “That’s what I wanted and I think that people return to those shows again and again for a reason.

When St. Denis Medical came her way, Tolman didn’t see herself in a network sitcom. She was trying to focus her career on “prestige TV” with splashy names attached. “I’ve been in many ways chasing Fargo since Fargo,” she said. (Tolman was nominated for an Emmy for the first season of FX’s Fargo anthology series.)

When she received the script, her father had just been in the hospital, so she had spent a lot of time living in the world the series is documenting. It struck her, then, how she, her mother, and her father had passed much of that time: watching sitcoms together in the hospital room.

“So I had sitcoms at the front of mind,” she said. “I just think there’s really a place for warm, comfortable comedies. I think we’ve sort of gotten away from that in recent years, but there’s something to be said for shows that cross all borders that you could watch with your uncle who lives in a red state, if you are a young person from a blue state. There’s a certain nostalgia for this kind of sitcom to me. It is very much a salve for a hard day, a hard week, or a hard year.”

There’s a “the world works in mysterious ways” backstory to McLendon-Covey’s involvement in the show as well. After 10 seasons and well over 200 episodes, her ABC sitcom The Goldbergs wrapped in May 2023. She got the script for St. Denis Medical four days after the Goldbergs cast was notified that the show wasn’t returning for another season.

“I just knew that I didn’t want to play a cuddly mom again any time soon, because I did that and I exhausted that premise,” she said.

Her character, Joyce, on St. Denis Medical is a buttoned-up hospital administrator, operating under a cocktail of positive-thinking and delusion that she can make this small Oregon facility a major institution in the medical community.

She desperately tries to show off for the documentary crew, only thinly veiling her irritation when her staff is incapable of performing the same charade. “I always say, the most infectious thing in a hospital is…” Joyce says, as nurses around her confusedly offer answers like “...staph?” “A smile,” Joyce concludes, looking into the camera, teeth gritted as she musters her own grin.

“I liked this character because she was not Beverly [from The Goldbergs], McLendon-Covey said. “She’s not a cuddly person.”

Joyce became a hospital administrator after a career as an oncologist, thinking that she could change the system from the inside. But, as each episode of St. Denis Medical reveals, with this staff and these circumstances, that’s an uphill battle. (“I was an oncologist for 20 years, but now that I’m a hospital administrator, I’m battling different kinds of cancers: cynicism, judgement…” Joyce says to the documentary crew. “Those attitudes are the real cancers.”)

“In her mind, she’s going to make this rural Oregon hospital a destination medical property,” McLendon-Covey said. “Like, ‘Hey, people are getting on planes to go to Turkey? Forget it. They’re going to go to rural Oregon!”

In the pilot, she blows the hospital’s budget on a state-of-the-art mammogram machine she wants to market as “The Best Breast Tests in the West!”

“And you know what’s going to sweeten the deal? A nice, Instagrammable Koi pond. She thinks if we pretty it up, the people will follow. Well, that’s absurd,” McLendon-Covey said. “But that’s what keeps her going. That’s what made me love her and made me want to play her, because she’s such an oddball.”

One of the premiere’s best gags and instantly captures the spirit of the show—recognizably human, but laugh-inducingly ludicrous—happens when Tolman’s Alex is trying to poignantly explain why she and her coworkers put up with the madness of their jobs.

“Every now and then, a moment comes along where you truly change someone’s life,” she says to the crew. “And that’s beautiful.” Immediately, a deranged patient who escaped from his room enters the frame behind her, hospital gown open and genitals exposed.

“It’s the perfect way to undercut things,” Tolman said. “Here’s an earnest moment, but also my job is so ridiculous.”

It also exemplifies one of the most resonant aspects of the series that people who have spent long periods of time in a hospital—whether as patients or as visitors to loved ones—will recognize: For all the trauma endured there, it’s also a hotbed for some of the most unexpectedly hilarious moments you’ll have in your life.

“It is people on their best days and their worst days in a hospital,” Tolman said. “And then there’s people who just work there and it’s just another day, which is wild to think about. They’re balancing being around people on their worst days. And then they also just have to get to their kids’ play by six o’clock. It is a level of compartmentalization that I truly cannot imagine”

(There’s a great plot in the St. Denis Medical pilot where Alex finds out that her daughter is going on as Donna in her school’s production of Mamma Mia!. “She’s Donna!” Alex excitedly says, repeating it to stress the monumental importance of this. I told Tolman that I couldn’t believe that Alex didn’t manage to leave work in time for the show. She’s Donna!!! “I would say that I had one more than one gay friend text me about that joke,” she said, laughing.)

At the end of our conversation, Grier told a story about his father, who was a psychiatrist—he’s been asked a lot about his father while promoting St. Denis Medical now that he’s playing a doctor himself.

His father died at age 89. “I saw him cry maybe three times in my life,” Grier said. After his parents divorced, Grier’s mother told him about a time when his father was a young intern and lost his first patient. “He came home that night, sat at the edge of the bed, and just wept.”

As a kid, you don’t know what your parents are going through when they’re at work. And when you’re at a hospital, you don’t know how the doctors, nurses, and everyone who is treating you are handling their days beyond when they’re attending to you.

“That’s what I feel our show can be, if we do it right and in an organic and real way,” Grier said. “Because, in fact, that is life. There are laughs and there are tears. But mostly we want to be funny and entertaining.”

And there you have it: David Alan Grier—and St. Denis Medical—just wrote you a prescription. You just have to tune in to fill it.