On Medical Series, Showrunners and Writers Ponder the Right Prescription Dashboard Dashboard

Medical drama writers balance writing worlds we know with the real world unknown.

Writers of medical dramas face a daunting challenge these days: how to integrate the COVID-19 pandemic into their fictional hospitals while staying true to what made their shows resonate with audiences in the first place. After all, when many of us last saw them, fictional ERs and hospitals were not being overrun with critically ill patients who’d fallen prey to a real-world virus that doctors were learning about on the fly.

Virtual writers’ rooms have been back in session for some time (see the April 24 issue of Connect) and many series are set to go back into production this summer, including some network medical series. On the topic of how they plan to address COVID-19 in their scripts and on their sets, Connect spoke with David Shore, developer and executive producer of The Good Doctor on ABC; Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, executive producers of Chicago Med on NBC; and Neal Baer, the pediatrician-turned-longtime-TV-writer who broke in on ER and is currently developing a pilot called The Edit, about the implications of gene-editing technology.

How do you balance needing to reflect the pandemic in your scripts with the fact that people like the specific world you created, which was pre-pandemic?

David Shore: We don’t want to re-create our show, we don’t want to do a different show. At the same time, that’s the debate. We have these stories we have been telling and want to continue to tell—and we are going to continue to tell them. At the same time, it feels dishonest to completely ignore it. The question is, how do we recognize this reality while still ultimately telling the stories we want to tell within this world, about these people. That’s what we’ve been doing for the last six weeks.

I don’t know who said it, it might have been Kenya Barris, it’s like trying to write about a fight while watching it in the third round. It’s not over yet. And things are changing so fast, and we’re writing a show about people working in a hospital, and I don’t know what that’s going to look like when these episodes air. So we had a lot of discussions about that.

Andrew Schneider: There will have been probably, for our characters, a six-month lapse since the last time we saw them. So where are they now, six months into this? Who’s had COVID-19, who’s recovered from COVID-19? Where are those romantic relationships six months down the line, how are they affected by this situation? One benefit is, having been a six-month interlude, in some ways it’s kind of a clean slate.

We’re trying to focus on the aspects of the season that are not dependent on the situation with the pandemic but have to do with the emotional arcs of our characters. But we will have to get into the nitty-gritty about the specifics of the how of the show and the look of the show. And determine [which] stories must be told because of the pandemic and [which] ones we don’t have to necessarily tell.

Our doctors, our consultants, say, “Well, you know, we’re doing everything now that we did six months ago, we just do it a little differently.” Heart attacks still come in, gastric bleeds still come in, cancer hasn’t stopped. So there are all those stories that are just told with a slight twist.

Diane Frolov: Because we are starting late, that chops off a number of episodes. Normally we would have nine episodes going into the winter break. So, let’s say we have three less this time. When we’re structuring the first six, we will have to look further than that, but right now that’s kind of what we know.

One of the things that is happening in [real world] hospitals is that life is going back to a kind of normal in that they are now doing regular surgeries, they have ways of sorting patients now that they didn’t have before.

Neal Baer: When ER started in 1994 [created by Michael Crichton], there was no treatment for HIV. That was a pandemic that was attacking certain groups of people and decimating them. Some shows dealt with it, some shows didn’t. We chose to deal with it by creating a character that was on the show for six years, and really getting into what that meant. Grappling with exactly what was going on in hospitals, about should we allow health care workers who are HIV-positive to treat patients. This was a real big debate and we grabbed onto it and wanted to explore it.

Just in terms of writing scenes with doctors, nurses, and staff, you have to be cognizant now of so much. How do you go about this from a writing standpoint and a production standpoint, given the current health crisis?

Shore: They’re two completely separate questions: What do we want to dramatize and how do we dramatize it, how do we produce it, and both are very big questions. The latter one, things change every day, but we’ve got great people working on it to ensure people’s safety. We are making storytelling choices to keep things as easy to produce as possible, as best we can determine.

[Story-wise] we’re going to deal with COVID-19 but then we’re going to get past that. We want to get back to [characters’] lives, I think people want that. It’s not going to be about COVID-19, going forward, it’s going to be about all the other illnesses and all the other problems that people have in their lives that they had before COVID-19 and will continue to have after COVID-19.

Schneider: The studio has its concerns, the guilds have their concerns. Cook County, where we shoot, has its own protocols and concerns—that’s all gotta come together.

Frolov: It’s also been, is TV coming back? Besides the creative challenges we have, production is also going to dictate some of this. How many people you can have running into an emergency department? How many people you can have in a scene, how many people you can have in a room.

We’re approaching this [and thinking], how does this open up new stories for us. [How], in positive ways, will this change the show?

Baer: It’s not about “doing COVID-19.” It’s about telling stories as they are now. [Generally speaking] there’ll be some stories about COVID-19. There’ll be some stories that are about HIV. There’ll be some stories that are about who has access to health care. These medical series have been doing stories about unequal access to health care for years. ER was doing it, there were shows doing it before. I remember we did a show about women with cervical cancer and who had cervical cancer. And it was women of color. Why is that? Because they didn’t have access to pap smears.

It’s been there, but I think it’s an accrual. I can only speak to how I do my shows. If I were doing a medical series now, I likely would be not doing COVID-19, but I would be doing the stories that people are dealing with now, which relate very much to COVID-19. Many of them, not all of them, relate to unequal access to treatment, they relate to inequality, stigma, racism, homophobia, sexism.