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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