Wednesday, November 20, 2024

St Denis Medical Is Just What The Network Sitcom Ordered

 

 

In my humble opinion the best comedy series of the 2000s was Scrubs. Make your arguments for The Office, Will & Grace or Everybody Loves Raymond; with the exception of Arrested Development this was the unquestioned masterpiece of network comedy during the first decade of the 20th century – at least until 30 Rock and its peers came along halfway through the decade.

Scrubs was sublime on many levels but perhaps the reason that it still resonates with me nearly fifteen years after its final season is that it was very likely as close as my generation will ever get to MASH.  The series was set in a hospital in an unnamed city and state and while it was one of the most hysterical comedies I’ve ever seen, it also had a greater acknowledgement of the tragedy that comes with working in a hospital. It acknowledged at least once an episode, probably even more. And the reason you had to acknowledge all of the shenanigans and silliness was because of the darker undertones. For that reason Scrubs was always the gold standard of the workplace comedy far more than The Office was because it acknowledged not only that everyone was at work but what happened when you screwed up.

Perhaps that was one of the reasons that when NBC announced the arrival of St. Denis Medical this fall season my ears perked up a little. As I’ve mentioned countless times and will keep doing comedy has been outstanding throughout this decade so far with at least three undeniable classics already on the books and the possibility for at least two or three more. Just as important to this has been the return in a big way of the network comedy which came out swinging with Abbott Elementary and has provided us with so many wonderful new shows in the last few years, some of which are unwatched by me (Ghosts; Young Sheldon) some of which I have mourned the loss of (Not Dead Yet) But it’s very clear the workplace comedy has engaged in a major revival, not just with Abbott but the revived and revitalized Night Court. Now here comes St. Denis which seems to be a combination of both Abbott Elementary and Scrubs but has the potential to be even better.

That’s a high bar to clear, I admit but even after a mere three episodes I can see the potential for greatness. It helps that, unlike with Abbott Elementary where the majority of the cast were relative unknowns, St. Denis Medical is starting off with one of the best rosters of any comedy series in a very long time, perhaps since Ted Lasso or Only Murders in the Building. Here is Alison Tolman as Alex, the head nurse, who burst on to the scene in Season 1 of Fargo and has rarely had a role worthy of her since. Here is Wendi McLendon-Covey, the matriarch of The Goldbergs for nearly a decade as Joyce, the overbearing manager of the title hospital, constantly trying to make this Oregon hospital better than it can be. Here is Josh Lawson, who spent more than five years on House of Lies trying to do his very best with material that was unworthy of him (and the entire roster) as the slightly egotistical surgeon Bruce. And here is David Alan Grier, one of the greatest comedy veterans of all time as the cynical attending Ron. This is the kind of series where the cast alone would be enough to make me watch and give far more latitude before I realize that the material isn’t worthy of them.

St. Denis is more than worthy of its cast. In just three episodes St. Denis has done much to give us pretty full portraits of almost all the leads, including the new intern  Matt, who was home schooled from Mormonism and is staggeringly hysterical in both his incompetence and idiocy. In another series this show would follow Matt around as he grew as a doctor and tried to become more acclimated. This series has realized almost immediately what a complete and utter moron Matt is and how the best thing this hospital can do is make sure he does as little as possible. I wouldn’t be shocked if he became the janitor by the time the first season was over.

Alex has just been promoted to head nurse and has more responsibility then she wants.  She’s trying to find a way for work/life balance and its pretty clear that she may not be capable of it. In the pilot she wants to go and see her daughter acting in Mamma Mia but she keeps come up with excuses not to go. Eventually she actually makes it into her car and by the time she’s there she witnesses a patient from the waiting room collapse in pain. Tolman has always had a salt-of-the-earth nature to her characters and its played to the comic effect, even though she’s more or less the straight woman so far.

Bruce is the overbearing and egotistical surgeon in this hospital but while there is a certain swell-headed nature to him the series goes out of its way to make him not only extremely good at his job but show his humanity. This is best executed in the second episode where the camera crew is following him around and he’s trying to show that by healing his patients he’s being a force of good. However when his first patient is someone who cheerfully forecloses on mortgages and his second is waiting for a white doctor, he has his doubts. However at the end of his second episode he opens up and tells a sad story about how he was at his science fair in high school and wondered why his father hadn’t shown up. He had suffered a brain aneurysm and died soon after. We get to see an example of his heart that’s moving – though the show immediately undercuts it with a fitting joke.

Joyce is the kind of boss we should want to hate – she goes out of her way to buy an expensive mammogram machine in the Pilot without checking to see if the hospital can either afford or whether it has the bandwidth for it. (It doesn’t so every computer crashes.) But as we see in the final moments she was once a very good doctor and she has great capabilities. In the second episode she talks about her work-life balance and it comes crashing down when her marimba teacher ends up dying in the hospital and she ends up breaking down, during a board meeting. McLendon-Covey gets to use some of the overbearing nature she did on The Goldbergs but there’s a harried and sympathetic nature to it that we didn’t see quite as often. She has to deal with the paperwork and she really doesn’t like having to do the harder work.

Ron is the oldest doctor who wants to be an aloof cynic but can’t pull it off. In the first episode he mocks Alex about staying at the office because she believes if she leaves the hospital and everything keeps going her role in the universe will fall apart. But he’s been married three times already and his kids don’t talk to him because of the job so it’s clear he’s worried. In the second episode he finds himself flirting with a younger woman and is punctured when she wants to set him up with his grandmother until he talks to her. He mentions that he’s been in a series of failed relationships with younger women before but he's trying to modify his standards. In last night’s episode he openly mocks the idea of superstition that his colleagues believe and puts a hex on the hospital. Naturally everything begins to go wrong and he continues to deny theirs anything to it. He puts a double hex on it and when Alex tries to argue they might cancel each other out, he says: “Triple hex!”

But in the course of it, the chief surgeon suffers a rattlesnake bite and when Bruce is about to perform his surgery he tries to help carry the patient’s cross into the hospital. (The cross, I should say, is the size of one in a church and the head nurse has been trying to haul it upstairs all episode.) When he does so he fractures his finger. Ron has no choice but to perform the kind of surgery he hasn’t done in more than a decade. While he does so things get notably worse and we see him mouthing words to himself.  When he’s talked to about it in the interview afterwards he is big enough to admit: “There are no atheists in a foxhole.” By the end of the episode he’s grown enough to agree to take some of the ideas for feng shui seriously.

And all of this plays with the delightful running gags of Matt, who keeps finding new and inventive ways to screw up. Last episode he was assigned to informing the patients of what happened because it was the one thing you couldn’t screw up – and he immediately did so, twice. He then realized the hospital chaplain hadn’t gone to divinity school and went out of his way to point that out to Joyce, who was not thrilled she had to fire the chaplain. She then tried to use Matt to perform prayers over a comatose patient which he did on his phone and immediately butchered. She ended up rehiring the chaplain and went Matt tried to apologize this man of God told Matt to step off and then performed a gesture that is frowned up by the Holy See but was completely understandable given the circumstances.

St. Denis has all of the ingredients to be a masterpiece in just three episodes. This may appear to be early to judge but not really; it took just two for me to realize Abbott Elementary had that same capability and by the end of its first season it was a phenomena. And like the title hospital, it is doing its part to revive a genre that was on life support at the time but is slowly making a remarkable recovery.  It has the guarantee of a full season order: 18 episodes and I think it can add itself to the slow but growing roster of power players in NBC’s comedy lineup. Whether it becomes the kind of classic that Abbott Elementary or Hacks already are remains to be seen, but its prognosis is very good. (Sorry for the medical metaphors. They’re better than Matt’s, trust me.)

My score: 4.5 stars.

 

 

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