St. Denis Medical: The Doctors Are In (and Stretched Thin) on NBC’s Latest Comedy — Grade the Premiere!
Got a Superstore-shaped hole in your TV lineup? St. Denis Medical is here to fill it.
NBC’s new medical comedy — which hails from Superstore and American Auto creator Justin Spitzer — arrived to the network’s primetime lineup with a two-episode premiere on Tuesday night. Before you give us your thoughts on the show’s debut, let’s revisit what happened in its first outings:
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In Episode 1, we meet all the major players at St. Denis Regional Medical Center, a safety net hospital that provides care to anyone, regardless of insurance or financial status. The hospital is underfunded and understaffed, though, and executive director Joyce (played by The Goldbergs‘ Wendi McLendon-Covey) has her work cut out for her if she wants to turn St. Denis into an international health care destination, as she claims in the pilot’s opening minutes.
In an effort to raise the hospital’s profile a bit, Joyce purchases a state-of-the-art mammography machine for St. Denis, which costs a whopping $300,000… and, Joyce quickly finds out, is much too powerful for the hospital’s current computing infrastructure. When one of the men hooking up the machine attempts to install its substantial software, the rest of the hospital’s computers and digital files immediately go down as a result, forcing the staff to handwrite everything for the rest of the evening. Seeing the toll this mammogram machine is taking on her stretched-thin staff and the building’s computing capabilities, Joyce ultimately decides not to sign the final paperwork for the machine and has it sent back to the warehouse. (Except, whoops: There’s a 10% restocking fee!)
Elsewhere, there’s Alex (Fargo‘s Allison Tolman), a workaholic whose micromanaging tendencies have only gotten worse since her recent promotion to supervising nurse. She’s excellent at her job, to be sure, but it’s coming at the cost of her family life; in the pilot, she repeatedly tries to leave work at 4 pm in order to see her daughter’s school production of Mamma Mia!, but she’s thwarted by the computer meltdown and, later, by emergency care that must be given to a patient who collapses in the hospital’s parking lot.
We’ve also got emergency physician Ron (The Cool Kids‘ David Alan Grier), who sums up the bureaucracy of health care by sharing that a two-second check-up on a patient’s heart murmur will be followed by “about 40 minutes of filling out electronic health records.” There’s Matt (The Sex Lives of College Girls‘ Mekki Leeper), a new floor nurse from Montana who’s entirely inept, but means well (and has an obvious crush on fellow nurse Serena). And there’s Bruce, a gifted trauma surgeon who is well aware he’s gifted. Much like the characters on Superstore and American Auto before it, this is a gaggle of lovable weirdos on St. Denis Medical, but they take the medicine and patient care seriously.
Then, in Episode 2, Alex teaches Joyce how to bring her personal life into her job at the hospital; Ron considers dating a patient’s grandmother (though it’s clear the 20-something patient is Ron’s real preference); and Matt gets educated on what it means to be an organ donor.
OK, your turn! What’d you think of St. Denis Medical‘s first two episodes? Grade Tuesday’s premiere in our poll below, then drop a comment with your full reviews!
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