Tickling your funny bone: Inside the operations of new workplace comedy “St. Denis Medical”

Creators Eric Ledgin and Justin Spitzer, star Wendi McLendon-Covey, and more of the ER-set staff preview the NBC mockumentary.

Wendi McLendon-Covey has a bad taste in her mouth. Literally.

"What flavor are these mints?" she asks her scene partner, Kaliko Kauahi, during episode 4 of NBC's new workplace mockumentary series, St. Denis Medical. 

"Disgusting."
"Ugh."
"They're oppressive. Oppressively minty."
"Well, they're horrible."
"It's making my tongue go numb. Bleh."

McLendon-Covey fires off a string of different ad-libbed reactions take after take — and wonders if Kauahi's character has any salami on hand to help "clear the deck" — earning smiles and laughs from producers, writers, and other crew who are listening and watching from monitors just 10 feet away on the hyperrealistic, 360-degree emergency room set.

On this late August day, as Entertainment Weekly visits the show's home at Universal Studios, the cast and crew are just a couple of weeks away from wrapping production on their first season, which debuts Nov. 12. Created by Eric Ledgin and Justin Spitzer — who, between them, have created, produced, and/or written workplace comedies The Office, Superstore, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and American Auto — St. Denis (named for the Patron Saint of Paris and France, who was also regarded as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers) centers on the day-to-day lives of the hospital's emergency department staff. That would be McLendon-Covey's oncological-surgeon-turned-hospital-executive-director, Joyce; David Alan Grier's jaded doctor Ron; Allison Tolman's dedicated supervising nurse, Alex; Josh Lawson's braggadocious trauma surgeon, Bruce; Kahyun Kim's chill-vibes-only nurse, Serena; Kauahi's veteran nurse, Val; and Mekki Leeper's newbie nurse, Matt.

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Their every move is the focus of a documentary crew thanks to Joyce, who's trying to bring more attention to the rural Oregon medical center and make it a mecca for breast cancer treatment. "She's a former oncologist, so she thought, 'I'm going to change things from the inside. I'm going to help out that way,'" McLendon-Covey explains of Joyce. "Now she's kind of stuck in a position where all she does is beg for money all day, trying to find donors, trying to keep this place running, trying to keep morale up, trying to keep her own morale up. And it's very hard."

Not that anyone would consider medical care — even in an administrative position — an easy job. But work has also become a large part of Joyce's identity, perhaps to her detriment. While she might have a sunny exterior, it's all a facade for the benefit of those she leads. "This is her life. She will die alone. She's not a fun lady," the actress says, laughing. "She's super efficient, very good at her job, but being good at that job means she probably doesn't have a lot of friends."

The character is in stark contrast to the woman she just finished playing for 10 years, Beverly Goldberg on ABC's The Goldbergs. The epitome of a helicopter mom, Bev was an adoring but overbearing mother, wife, and daughter. Her "smother" mentality often landed her in comedic contention with her family, but she was also unapologetically herself.

McLendon-Covey received the script for St. Denis the same day she found out The Goldbergs was canceled. With her matriarchal days coming to a close, she knew her next role had to be "something completely different."

"I didn't want to play another mom right away. I did that, and I was going to be closely associated with that," admits the Bridesmaids and Reno 911 alum. "[Joyce] is a woman that cannot nurture anything. She cannot keep a plant alive. She has stuffed animals all around her office, but she could not mother a thing." (And yes, the actress was also happy to leave behind Bev's signature wacky sweaters and wig — though, she does "miss the efficiency of the wigs — I do miss only spending 10 minutes in the chair.")

Related: Wendi McLendon-Covey is glad she didn't know The Goldbergs was ending when she filmed the finale

It's lucky for Spitzer and Ledgin, who weren't even sure the actress would want to dive into another series, having just starred on one for a decade. "I was surprised. I didn't think she'd be interested. I would've thought she'd want a break," says Spitzer. "But she loves to work."

"That was crazy, but I didn't want to have any downtime," McLendon-Covey says, "for my own mental health."

Ledgin admits that he and Spitzer initially imagined Joyce as "a little more sputtering, maybe a little more outwardly insecure." But "Wendi brings a strength that's just there no matter what. And that strength manifests itself in different ways," he explains. "What she brought was way more active and interesting than maybe what I was picturing."

Case in point: While filming the pilot, Joyce tries to hype up her colleagues after a situation that she mismanaged damages staff morale — but sometimes words just aren't enough. So, improvising, McLendon-Covey did a cartwheel. "She just went for it — in heels!" Ledgin recalls, his eyes lighting up thinking about the scene. "The whole group of actors were like, 'Whoa!' And it was totally genuine. That's in the show now because it was just so surprising and weird."

Weird is a word the co-creators find particularly fitting for Joyce, who audiences will learn has a few interesting hobbies. For the past few years, she's been taking marimba lessons, even showing off her skills to her co-workers in one episode. "I'm not ready to give a concert yet, but it was fun playing that and having that at my house for a little bit," the actress says of really learning to play the elaborate percussion instrument.

As with the bad mint scene, McLendon-Covey delighted writers and producers with a whole host of options while filming the marimba sequence, improvising different names for an original song that Joyce wants to play for them, including:

"Raindrops and Dinosaurs"
"Madagascar Surprise"
"Ladybug Frenzy"
"Smitten With Kittens"
"Oopsie, I Poopsied on the Dance Floor"

Audiences will also learn about some of Joyce's other "solitary pursuits," as McLendon-Covey describes them. "Yeah, she is a bit of a weirdo," the actress wholeheartedly concedes. "Would she call herself that? No, but I would."

That said, there is a word Spitzer knows Joyce would use. "Boss," he declares, attributing that all to his star. "The fact that [Wendi] brought this boss energy is something that I'm grateful that we have, even though it may not have exactly been what I was picturing originally."

He has some experience with big boss energy, after all, as a co-executive producer and writer on The Office, and then creator, writer, and EP of Superstore.

“You don't want to ever repeat what's been done, but there's only so many settings for shows out there," Spitzer says, reflecting on the genre he and Ledgin have made their playground. "We talked a lot early on about what's been done in this space. Scrubs obviously comes to mind, and that was a show that I loved but it feels very different — the characters, and tonally," he continues. "It's not like we set out to be a whole different type of mockumentary. We started off first talking about a hospital comedy and something that dealt with the minutia of the day-to-day life of the doctors and nurses, and then the mockumentary aesthetic came later."

Ledgin had been toying around with the hospital setting for several years. Afraid of them as a child, his opinion changed when he was in his 20s. "I was dating someone who got very sick and we had to go to the hospital a lot for surgeries and chemo," he explains. "I found that my fears were unfounded in the sense that hospitals are filled with people who are there to help you, and they're also often very funny places."

For example, a work trip to the outskirts of Seattle with Steve Schneider (who plays St. Denis’ chaplain) that resulted in a trip to the E.R. "My friend, after a couple drinks, tried to jump over a little ravine and fell on a stake and pierced his butt cheek," Ledgin recalls, admitting his anecdote might be "an overshare." "We ended up in the graveyard shift of some middle-of-nowhere hospital. The first doctor walked in, [Steve is] face down on the table, and she glances at him and goes, 'Huh, he shaves his balls. Okay, so here's what we're going to do...' It was such a funny shift of hospital workers, and I was so surprised by that."

So what better way to honor the people he witnessed provide care and laughs than by putting them in the spotlight in a network comedy?

"You get a lot of comedy from people's negative qualities or their flaws, and it's a lot easier to have fun with that and keep people likable if their profession is a more noble one. So someone can be a little selfish or whatever, but what they're doing is a selfless profession," Spitzer explains. "It's been said before that when in a hospital, any patient you meet — aside from the ones who are giving birth — you're seeing them on one of the worst days of their year, if not their lives. There is a group of people surrounded by that at all times, and it's just a fun show to see what keeps them going."

It's a show Allison Tolman never expected to join. "I would never have thought in a million years that the next place I ended up would be in a network sitcom," says the actress known for Why Women Kill; Emergence; and Fargo, for which she received an Emmy nomination. But months before filming the show's pilot in early 2023, Tolman's dad was in the hospital battling an illness. When her mom came home each night after spending the day with him, half-hour comedies were her medicine.

"That's all she could stomach. She couldn't do anything longer, and she couldn't do anything sad," Tolman recalls of their binges of shows including Only Murders in the Building and Mythic Quest. "I think sitcoms have a different place in my heart than they would have had I not spent that time with my mom while my dad was sick. So then the script came along and I was like, 'I want to make a show that people can palate at the end of a long day.' It was meant to be."

While Tolman's recently promoted Alex is a comforting, kind presence in the emergency room, David Alan Grier's divorced Ron is wearied. Grier imagines Ron was once an enthusiastic, even radical, medical student and young surgeon who's just been beaten down the bureaucracy.

"My dad was a doctor, and at a certain point after he got older, he just said, 'I don't even know psychiatry [anymore],'" Grier shares. "It's true: You have to continually reeducate. There's so many advances. The business of medicine changes. And now, the amount of time that doctors have to do paperwork has grown exponentially. Two-thirds of their job is just writing up s---, which has changed. Ron's totally been broken by the system, but he has moments and tries to fight the good fight."

Josh Lawson's Bruce couldn't be more Ron's opposite. An incredibly talented surgeon, his office is full of awards — all filling his need for approval and validation, which he gets in a big way as Employee of the Quarter in the episode that was filming when EW visited the set. He unabashedly boasts about the honor at every turn, even pointing out his achievement in the midst of giving a post-procedure update to the family of one patient.

"An egomaniac, I think, is inherently an unlikable characteristic. And so treading that line of being someone you can laugh at and someone who is the architect of his own downfall but also has a relatively sunny disposition about everything makes him accessible. 'Nothing's a problem, Bruce is here!'" the Australian actor says, earning laughs from costar Mekki Leeper (Jury Duty) and Kaliko Kauahi, seated next to him. "He's got a positivity which really helps make him someone you love to hate in a way."

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Lawson, like Kauahi, also appeared on Spitzer's Superstore. There, her fan-favorite character Sandra was timid, but St. Denis' Val — who was only supposed to be a guest star but the network made a series regular after seeing initial footage — is someone you "wouldn't want to cross," Kauahi says.

Leeper's RN, Matt, learns that quickly. A newbie to St. Denis, he grew up in Montana with religious parents who don't believe in medicine. He's late on his first day of work — just one of several mishaps witnessed by fellow nurse Serena. While she's sure he's going to get fired, he thinks he's met "the girl of his dreams." Spoiler alert: He keeps his job…and he might also be right about her. "There's a little romance," Serena actress Kahyun Kim teases. "Will they, won't they?"

The creators and cast were asking a similar question last year: Will the series get the greenlight, or won't it? They filmed the pilot prior to 2023's dual Hollywood strikes and — like much of the industry — had to wait six months to learn their fate. With the good news secured, even then, the series didn't go into production until mid-2024.

Grier admits he thought the show would get scrapped. "I'm a depressed actor," he says, deadpan. "At some point, they're going to drop all this, right?”

McLendon-Covey, seated next to him, laughs as she interjects: "We always go to the worst-case scenario, don't we?" But their outlook shifts when they think about the nurses and doctors they get to honor — like Abbott Elementary with teachers — through the show's storylines and characters.

"I hope they feel seen and respected because they've gone through a lot in the past few years as well," McLendon-Covey says. "I think this is a journey that people will relate to because, listen, we don't want to, but we're all going to end up in a hospital at some point."

Ideally, one with some good mints.

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Directed by Kristen Harding + Alison Wild

Photography by Sami Drasin

Motion - DP: Amina Zadeh; Techo Crane Op: Eli Franks; Techno Crane Tech: Steven Neel; 1st AC: Rebecca Baliko; Gaffer: Mike Williamson; Best Electric: Christian Mejia; Key Grip: Kipp Rodriguez; Best Grip: Jason Shertick; Grip Trainee: MacLaine Dirksen; Camera PA: Kyle Venberg; PA: Carly Berryhill

Production - Production Design: Ward Robinson/Wooden Ladder; PD Team: Rene Ureno, Abimael "Aby" Linares, David Celaya; Styling: Alvin Stillwell/Celestine Agency; Tailor: Sharon Patterson; Hair: Robert Steinken/Celestine Agency; Makeup: Anton Khachaturian/Cloutier Remix

Photo - 1st Assistant: Joe Beckley; 2nd Assistant: Sam Tiger; Digital Tech: Connor Hughes

Post-Production - Color Correction: Nate Seymour/TRAFIK; Design: Chuck Kerr; VFX: Lily Cunningham; Sound Design: Kristen Harding

Video Interview - DP: Ted Newsome; Cam Op: Mark Cheche; Sound: Patrick Hurley; Associate Producer: Salem Daniel; Editor: Maura Willey

EW Creative - Photo Director: Alison Wild; Head of Video: Kristen Harding; Creative Director: Chuck Kerr