At the halfway point of the 2020s
I feel qualified to write about several trends of what television now looks
like. One of those that I'm the most personally gratified by is that the era of
the mean-spirited comedy foisted upon us by those such as Ricky Gervais and
Armando Iannucci seems to have finally gone extinct. With the last surviving product
of its breed Curb Your Enthusiasm finally going away for good in 2024
the era where we were forced to laugh at the horribly toxic behavior of white
people of privilege, usually as they called each other combinations of obscenities
meant to be jokes would seem to finally be behind us. There might have been some who found shows
such as Derek and Veep hysterically funny; I never did and I was
sick of them well before the 2016 election.
The trend of the decade in comedy
when it comes to both critical acclaim and audience response is more towards
community and trying to build bridges rather than push away those around. This
has been clear with the reception for two shows that are on the short list of
many to be the best shows of the entire decade Reservation Dogs and Euphoria
as well as the masterpiece Abbott Elementary. Ted Lasso may have
been the bellwether series in this regard but there have been plenty of other
classics that have followed in its wake from Only Murders in the Building to
Hacks to Shrinking. Arriving
last year, just when we needed it the most was NBC's St. Denis Medical, a
wondrous comedy series which in my initial rave I said was the closest thing
we'd gotten in years to Scrubs. (And now we'll be getting a revival of Scrubs.
I'll write about that later.)
St. Denis came while the medical drama
itself was getting new life. In the 2024-2025
season three brilliant new medical series that were anything but Shondaland
adjacent burst on to the scene. The NBC drama Brilliant Minds premiered last
October, Fox's Doc debuted last January and this past February The
Pitt came along and became part of the American consciousness so quickly
that it managed to sweep past Severance to win Best Drama two months
ago. Now that it's clear that the medical drama has been, ahem, resuscitated past
what we've been used to from twenty years of Grey's Anatomy it is
fitting that a brilliant combination of medicine and the workplace comedy have
joined forces to become something just as sublime.
St. Denis continues the tradition of the
revival of the workplace network comedy that Abbott Elementary breathed
fresh life into at the start of the decade. The title refers to a hospital in
Portland, Oregon where a staff of professionals, underfunded and underappreciated,
try to do their best in a typical emergency room. At the top is Joyce, the
wonderful Wendi McLendon-Covey, who spent most of last season trying to raise
money for the 'premiere birthing center in Oregon'. At the end of last season, she
managed to get an angel to do so and has spent the summer building the most
brilliant one possible.
Then the angel in question wanted
to see what her money had wrought and a frantic Joyce pulled Alex (the always pleasant
Alison Tolman) away from her Hawaiian vacation hangover to try and make sure
every aspect of the birthing center was perfect for her donor. Then she got another call from the donor's
secretary telling her that she might want to leave it completely blank so that
she could make suggestion. Joyce then frantically spent the next hour tearing
everything down and in some cases, leaving holes in the walls. Naturally, the
appointment had to be rescheduled.
McLendon-Covey could easily make
Joyce into a buffoon but Joyce is like everyone else at St. Denis: she just wants
to do her best. If she overcorrects to a ridiculous degree, she will just as
quickly end up being pulled in the other direction when she runs into the
financial constraints of her job. We found that out in the second episode of
last night's premiere when Bruce (Josh Lawson) was the victim of some kind of
attack, the most recent in a line of attacks at the hospital. Alex asks Joyce
to provide extra security which Joyce was more than willing to do – until she
found out how much it would cost.
She then proceeded to engage in
some ridiculous self-defense techniques, including what happened if you were abducted
in the parking lot and you ended up in the back seat of your kidnapper's
car. This led to Alex going out of her
way to call local news and demand media attention to raise awareness of what
was going on. Joyce was alarmed because she knew how the media attention would
look but Alex was determined – until she learned that Bruce had been attacked
by a goose. The segment that followed with Alex trying to back away from her original
point, Joyce then raising all the attention to the attack and Bruce finally
telling them what happened was hysterical in the show's signature style.
Much of the first two episodes
have been reestablishing the characters from where they were at the end of last
season. Some of the characters have changed: Matt (Mekki Leeper(who by far
seemed the most incompetent of the cast has become somewhat more savvy about
the medical world around him, though he is clearly just as oblivious before. (He
says he went to Red Lobster last summer and that 'they made a mean hot dog.")
He spent most of the first season with a serious crush on Serena (Kihyun Kim)
who spent the first season thinking he was gay. Then when she learned about his
feelings for her she then spent much of the season 2 premiere trying to get him
to admit he was on to her, passive aggressively trying to get Alex to go on her
side and then against there and then had to hear that Matt was now over his crush
on her. This may be a slow burn romance but I'm not convinced that Matt will
pick up on it until he's actually on fire.
Josh Lawson is wonderful as Bruce,
the chief surgeon who has the biggest ego possible and makes everything about
him while trying very hard to make it seem
that it's not all about him. Lawson is clearly having the time of his life
playing a clearly skilled surgeon who has an enormous and fragile ego often
simultaneously. In the season premiere he wants to relate a near-death
experience he had on vacation and he's annoyed when everyone spends too much
time dealing with a man who's been struck by lightning twice. In his on-camera aside, it's clear he wants to
blame the patient for doing something to bring the forces on nature on himself.
And as always the character who
brings joy even as he brings his despairing nature is the master David Alan
Grier as Ron. His best moment in the two episode premiere was when in order to
prove to Serena that she was unprepared for a surprise attack he tried to make
a sudden move – and threw his back out. He spent the rest of the episode trying
to deny this was actually a problem, hysterically playing out when he was
called to a ward and he took a patient in a wheelchair with him to supply
support. ("But I'm waiting for my son," she said. "He'll find
you," he assured her.") Eventually this episode ended with him acknowledging
the truth to Serena when he had to have her take him to his car.
What's wonderful about St.
Denis Medical is that while there is some snark, ego and some genuinely
clueless side-characters, none of them are mean to each other and all know that
the important thing is the patients. These are professionals who are funny and
good at their jobs, something that was lacking from far too many comedies
in the previous decade. This carries on
the documentary style filmmaking that's been going on since The Office but
just like with Abbott Elementary these are actually people I'd like to
hang out with and who I'd trust in a crisis. I don't know what the patient
satisfaction scores at the title hospital, but as someone who chronically comes
back, I have no complaints about the staff.
My Score: 4.75 Stars.
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