Eric Ledgin and Justin Spitzer developed ‘St. Denis Medical’ while still working on ‘American Auto,’ drawn to a grounded mockumentary format. Their shared history with the format — from ‘The Office’ to ‘The Comedians’ — helped shape a fresh take on the medical workplace comedy.
“I had a fairly vague idea to do a medical comedy, had talked to some people in the industry, and had some loose ideas,” Ledgin tells Awards Focus. “I also had a vague idea to create a show with Justin. The two came together in a beautiful way. I will say the most surprising thing is that it was easier than we thought it would be, which was a good sign.”
They told Awards Focus how other shows they worked on played a role in shaping the series. Spitzer reflects back on a character exercise that he learned from Greg Daniels while writing for ‘The Office and later brought to a pair of workplace comedies, ‘Superstore’ and ‘American Auto.’
“Look at different character permutations,” Spitzer said. “You don’t want the same pairings all the time and you’d be surprised how you do that exercise. You’re like, Oh, we haven’t done a story with these two characters. Where’s our Bruce-Joyce story?“
Created by Eric Ledgin and Justin Spitzer, ‘St. Denis Medical’ is a mockumentary centered on a stretched-thin Oregon hospital, where dedicated staff balance patient care with everyday mayhem. The cast includes Wendi McLendon-Covey, David Alan Grier, Allison Tolman, Josh Lawson, Kahyun Kim, Mekki Leeper and Kaliko Kauahi.
Season 1 of ‘St. Denis Medical’ is currently available to stream on Peacock. Season 2 is currently in production.
Awards Focus: It’s so nice to meet you today. How are you doing?
Justin Spitzer: Pretty good. Thank you.
Eric Ledgin: Nice to meet you. How are you doing?
AF: What was the genesis behind ‘St. Denis Medical’?
Ledgin: Well, I had a fairly vague idea to do a medical comedy, had talked to some people in the industry, and had some loose ideas. I also had a vague idea to create a show with Justin. The two came together in a beautiful way. I will say the most surprising thing is that it was easier than we thought it would be, which was a good sign.
Spitzer: Yeah, yeah. We already had a really good working relationship. We really enjoy working together and respect each other.
And yeah, it’s not this crazy heightened premise where it’s like, oh my gosh, the kind of premise that is fun for an episode or two or burns out. The premise is a mockumentary in a hospital with these people so it’s not like you seize on that log line and you totally see the show.
But in talking, we started talking about the kind of characters, the kind of story, the kind of tone a show like this would have, and it just got more and more exciting.
And then, like Eric said, it was surprisingly easy, which I’ve started to realize is the sign that it’s gonna go well. You think like, Oh, the harder I work, the better it’ll be. We did work hard, but when you fall into it, then it just becomes inevitable and the executives like it, and you’re like, Oh yeah, we’re all on board. We’re all seeing this the same way.
AF: At what point in the writing process did it become a mockumentary?
Ledgin: Pretty early. Yeah, it was in the very beginning stages of talking about what it would be.
Spitzer: I worked on ‘The Office’ from the beginning of my career. I love mockumentary. Eric had also worked on a mockumentary early in his career. They kind of had gone away somewhat for a while. I mean, even after ‘The Office’ and ‘Parks,’ there was ‘What We Do in the Shadows,’ but then ‘Abbott Elementary’ was having success and that’s a really well done show. It felt like, okay, there might still be an appetite for this kind of form.
AF: Having worked on mockumentaries before, how did that inform your approach to creating St. Denis Medical?
Spitzer: I think when you’ve worked on them, you really get into the nitty gritty, and you start to see, Okay, how are we going to be slightly different? I think fairly early on, Eric had the notion of, Well, I watch ‘Below Deck’ a bunch. This is Eric—I’ve never seen ‘Below Deck.’ Now and then, you’ll hear—when they can’t cut around, it wouldn’t make sense to just hear a talking head. You might hear the producer asking a question. That’s a device we use, but we use it very, very sparingly, which I like. It’s not, they’re not that present, but every fifth episode, it helps. You find those things along the way.
Ledgin: Yeah. Because it’s in a hospital, when you watch an actual documentary that takes place in a hospital, there’s so much movement because they have to get out of the way and there’s more urgency. I think that in contrast to something like ‘The Office,’ which I was a huge fan of, there was so much stillness to that show, so much time-wasting because of the nature of it. It’s a little bit inverted here where it feels like they almost shouldn’t be taking too much time to do these interviews because they have stuff to do.
Spitzer: That’s a good way of putting it. I mean, ‘The Office’ really was illustrating monotony and this is an incredibly exciting place.
AF: Did you do any particular research while writing or prior to filming the pilot?
Ledgin: There’s a lot of talking the ears off of any medical professional that would give us the time of day. We watched a lot of documentary stuff. We read memoirs, books written by medical professionals. It was just trying to find stuff everywhere, talking about our own experiences in hospitals. It’s one of those things, where even if you don’t work in the industry, everyone has a couple of those dinner party stories that they tell. Whenever they were not too dark, they were fair game.
Spitzer: What’s great is, in terms of watching other docuseries, every now and then someone will say, what is this hospital that’s allowing a documentary to get made? But, you look on TV, there are so many docuseries set in hospitals, whether ERs or dermatologists or foot doctors. I mean, every specialty. The amount of resources for research are more than we could watch in a year.
AF: For the both of you, what did you bring to this show that you learned from working on shows like Superstore, American Auto, etc.?
Spitzer: It’s so hard to quantify sometimes, but I think there were workplace shows with strong ensembles and you just kind of get a sense of, are we servicing everyone? It’s something that Greg Daniels on ‘The Office’ would do as an exercise that I brought onto ‘Superstore’ and ‘American Auto’, and Eric does here in ‘St. Denis.’
Look at different character permutations. You don’t want the same pairings all the time and you’d be surprised how you do that exercise. You’re like, Oh, we haven’t done a story with these two characters. Where’s our Bruce-Joyce story?
I think that’s certainly one thing we’ve kind of got. Many of the things are regular. I was going to say marrying chaos and occasional absurdity with groundedness, but I think a lot of shows do that.
Ledgin: I think something that I really enjoyed doing with Justin on ‘American Auto’ was finding an issue or a conflict where you felt you could really argue either side really strongly and feel there was validity to either side. Those are always exciting to do.
I think one thing that I got from ‘Always Sunny’ is because a lot of those guys who make that show are acting in it, they’re very concerned with, what do I want in this scene? What do I want in this story? I’m always trying to think about if something feels flat, do I know what each character really wants here and what’s in the way of that?
It’s one of those things I think you internalize from every job you have in the positive or negative, what you wanna do.
AF: I know from talking to Wendi McLendon-Covey the other day that she received the script for the pilot on the same day that ‘The Goldbergs’ was cancelled. How did you balance working on ‘American Auto’ and writing the pilot script for ‘St. Denis Medical’?
Ledgin: I don’t remember. (Laughs)
Spitzer: I’m trying to remember exactly what the process was at that point.
Ledgin: Yeah, I think it did overlap with a bit of a break from what I remember. Some of it did, but the time that didn’t just chipped away and then fits and bursts or whatever, we would just figure out a bunch of it, put it down for a while, figure out a bunch more. But truly, I don’t remember. You’re talking about at least a hundred years ago.
Spitzer: (Laughs) And none of us were sleeping. But yeah, there is something nice about that. You have that drawn-out process. You could talk between times. Even though Covid was tapering, we tried working in person, but then we returned to Zoom rooms. But Eric and I would work in person. What was good is sometimes, we’d turn off the Zooms and people have assignments and be like, Oh, we have an extra hour. Let’s talk about act three of the pilot.
AF: She also mentioned that you all don’t do any Fraturdays and like going home to your families.
Ledgin: (Laughs) I’m glad that we have that reputation. I try to run a humane factory here. We both have young kids. I have a baby. We love our families. I think that there’s this myth of the late nights where you come up with all that great stuff. But I think the truth is a lot of that stuff, the next day, you’re like, none of this fucking works at all. We have enough fun, but we also focus and we get it done.
Spitzer: Also, you’re very organized and efficient. I believe everything Eric just said. At the same time, when I ran ‘Superstore’ and ‘American Auto,’ we had dinners a lot. I couldn’t do it. I think that is one area Eric really shines at much more. He comes in, he knows what he wants. He’s direct and it makes for a really happy writing staff. I don’t know if we’ve had—did we have one dinner last year? None this year. I mean, very little.
Ledgin: We haven’t had one yet. I mean, we pushed it almost.
Spitzer: I’ll see emails will come out. You’ll go home. I’ll see a 10:30 PM email. You’ll start working again, but the staff is has time to be with their families.
AF: When it comes to breaking story in the writers’ room, how do you all decide who writes what episodes?
Ledgin: It’s a really good question. Even that sometimes changes. Occasionally, somebody happens to have pitched that exact story and you want to pair them with that. Or they have some experience in their life or their family member that you want to tie them to it and that does happen I would say 10 to 20 percent of the time, but usually it’s sort of just whose turn is it, who’s in the room right now, or who do we think might land this one particularly well. There are writers that handle darker a little edgier stuff better. There are writers that handle more fun or more love stories better. Sometimes, you’re just thinking about that aspect of it, but it’s fairly random to be honest.
Spitzer: I always wish we would do away with certainly writers getting paid per script. I’d even take like writers names off it because every script is written by the room in the end—sometimes much more of the writer’s draft gets through. Sometimes, it gets rewritten. Sometimes it gets rewritten, but not because they did a bad draft, but because the show changes. I wish it was like college football or something where it’s like, let’s take the names off the jerseys. It’s not about the individual guy.
AF: How much room is there for improv on set?
Ledgin: There’s always room. Our crew works really hard and they work really fast. Because of that, we’re able to get what we imagined or some version of what we imagined good and in the pace and tone of our show. And then we can play around.
I think we’ve found a balance in season one that I expect will continue in season two, where it’s just, when it happens, it’s great. I think our actors are really good at being like, that improv worked or that improv maybe didn’t, and we’ll go back to scripted. If not, we have a discussion about it.
But we have really, really talented actors and some of them enjoy improvising and are great. Some of them don’t enjoy it as much. It’s really up to them.
AF: It’s not lost on me that this series premiered just after last year’s election. How important is it to have comedy in our lives right now?
Ledgin: I don’t know that it was ever not super important. I feel like it’s one of the basic human expressions. It’s the one related to joy. I have always been the type of person that has been laughing in the back of the classroom in school or trying to make my friends laugh. That doesn’t mean I had to have gone into comedy. I think like a lot of people are like that. Imagine life without laughing seems almost not worth living. Sure, definitely now, probably on the more side. But I don’t know. For me, it’s always been a huge reason for existing and part of my life.
Spitzer: Yeah. There’s always a place for escapism. I don’t know if it’s an administration you disagree with or whatever, if that’s more of a reason or not. There’s certainly always great comedies. You get comedy from reality television in any number of ways. Hopefully, we’ll still be going in 2029.
AF: Speaking of comedy, how did you first become interested in becoming comedy writers?
Spitzer: I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a writer, but I sort of fell into it a little. I started just doing improv in college and kind of liked that, but never the class clown. You would never describe me as the funniest guy there. But I don’t know, I just kind of fell into it in that respect. I could easily, if things had changed slightly, ended up writing a drama spec and tried that path.
Ledgin: I will just go back to your previous question for one second. I will just add that I do think, specifically given how just divided we are and how it seems like there are facts that can’t be agreed upon and there’s almost no consistent narrative—anything that is uniting people, whether it’s a comedy or a TV show we all love or a Super Bowl we can all watch, I do think that those are as important as they’ve ever been, for what that’s worth.
In terms of my own getting into comedy, I think it probably did start young where I just like really enjoyed—instead of paying attention in calculus class, I was like writing little bits on my scrap paper and stuff. I didn’t think I was going to necessarily go into that. I liked writing and I had a friend named Stephen Schneider, who I went to college with, that pulled me into comedy because that’s what he wanted to do, and I was kind of a follower. I just enjoyed it so much, I wanted to keep doing it.
Spitzer: He plays the pastor on our show.
AF: In a world where second seasons are not guaranteed and many shows are lucky just to finish the first season, how did it feel to get the call that NBC renewed ‘St. Denis Medical’ for a second season?
Spitzer: Good, yeah.
Ledgin: Amazing. I mean, you’ve had it before. I have not. It felt incredible. Yeah, it was just a little bit ego-wise, but especially just—I love the people we work with. I love what we get to do, even when it’s really hard. There’s a huge crew that started out on ‘Superstore’ and that I worked with on two of Justin’s shows. And now, I get to still work with. You don’t usually have that kind of continuity in the business. I love our writers; room. I love to be employed and work.
Spitzer: Now that’s very nice.
Ledgin: So it was awesome.
Spitzer: I think I was always—maybe because I’m not the showrunner, but it felt inevitable fairly early on. We had so much creative support from the studio and the network right from the beginning. And then when we aired and your first episode’s ratings, whatever, that’s going to change. But by the time episode four rolls around, at that point, you kind of know. And we settled, but we didn’t settle too low. And it was like, Okay, I don’t see how this doesn’t come back for at least a second season, given that we have creative support and our numbers are certainly better than many other shows.
AF: Thank you so much. It was so nice to meet you and I look forward to watching season two.
Spitzer: Thank you. Well, thank you so much for doing this.
Ledgin: Nice talking to you.