‘St. Denis Medical’ Review: NBC’s Hospital Mockumentary Has Heart but Lacks Teeth

Justin Spitzer is the nice guy’s Armando Iannucci — which is to say that if the Superstore and American Auto showrunner’s work were 25 percent angrier and 75 percent more profane, perhaps more attention would be paid to his ever-expanding resumé of comic critiques of eroding institutions. 

Of course, it’s the muted anger and the lack of profanity that allow Spitzer to do something borderline Chayefsky-esque within a broadcast television landscape currently better suited for Big Bang Theory spinoffs, mismatched family sitcoms and Abbott Elementary (the last a hit so elusive, ABC has done nothing at all to follow it up).

Created with Superstore veteran Eric Ledgin, Spitzer’s latest NBC comedy, St. Denis Medical, shifts his satirical focus from Midwestern retail workers and car manufacturing executives to a midsized hospital in non-Portland, Oregon. Like the early installments of Superstore and American Auto, the three episodes of St. Denis Medical sent to critics come across as a little toothless, steering away from scathing commentary on our frequently dysfunctional healthcare system in favor of familiar plotlines about egomaniacal doctors, overworked nurses and wacky patient misadventures.

Still, the ensemble cast is very quickly good enough to make St. Denis Medical worth checking out, or at least checking in on after allowing it time to fine-tune its voice.

St. Denis is a so-called “safety net hospital,” providing care for everybody regardless of economic status. The hospital is managed by Wendi McLendon-Covey’s Joyce, an oncologist turned administrator who, despite lacking in staff and financial resources, is determined to boost its profile on the national stage.

Most of our time is spent with the emergency department, overseen by world-weary doctor Ron (David Alan Grier) and his lead trauma surgeon Bruce (Josh Lawson), whose diagnostic approach is based on watching too much House. Alex (Allison Tolman), a mother who struggles to maintain work-life balance, is the newly promoted supervising nurse, with Kahyun Kim’s Serena as her spirituality-curious second-in-command. The latest addition to the staff is Matt (Mekki Leeper), a wet-behind-the-ears nurse from an ultra-religious background.

Superstore veterans Kaliko Kauahi, as a droll intake nurse, and Nico Santos, who has yet to appear in the episodes I’ve seen, round out the ensemble.

Ruben Fleischer, a regular director on Superstore, sets the St. Denis Medical visual template, which is mostly an extension of the mockumentary conventions from The Office and Parks and Recreation. (The opening credits sequence borders on plagiarism for the well-trod genre.) The format is a good one for a medical comedy, allowing for brief beats of handheld intensity when patients arrive in emergency situations and facilitating an instant connection between the characters and the camera during the obligatory confessional interviews. 

The latter becomes even easier when you have a cast this personable. Tolman is particularly good as the everywoman at the center of this assemblage of wacky medics: exasperated but caring, devoted to her profession yet vaguely agog by everything she’s watching unfold. Grier expertly blends grouchy and avuncular, skeptical and devoted, without making either extreme feel like a cliché.

The character work is less finely balanced elsewhere. Especially in the pilot, St. Denis Medical seems not to get that while a bumbling newbie archetype like Leeper’s Matt can be very funny in a workplace context, the humor doesn’t apply in medical situations where lives hang in the balance. But subsequent chapters refine Matt’s oddness, and when the stakes are lower — as when he questions the faith of the hospital chaplain, or tries to get two patients from a nearby prison to resolve their differences — his naivete plays much better. Similarly, there’s a broadness to McLendon-Covey’s Joyce in the premiere — she tries to inspire employees with a cheerleading routine ending in a cartwheel — that subsequently gets toned down.

Then again, I’m not sure any character is broader than Lawson’s perpetually oblivious Bruce, but nothing I’ve seen so far has made me laugh as hard as his work in the episode revealing the character’s fear of needles.

Still, that plot, however appealingly wacky, reflects an overall softness in the series’ gaze. “Doctor is scared of needles,” “doctor doesn’t believe in office superstitions,” “nurse might miss kid’s school production of Mamma Mia!” and “doctor really likes milkshakes” are storylines that can and do generate some chuckles. But it’s hard not to notice missed opportunities for meatier examinations of, for instance, insurance failings, the high cost of female-centric medical equipment or anything related to the carceral industry. Even the one mention of COVID — which Superstore engaged with better than any other show on TV — is just a tossed-off punchline.

Is St. Denis Medical still the fall’s most ambitious network sitcom? I guess? Man, that’s a low bar. Will a sharper perspective eventually emerge? Possibly. Is it unfair to expect it to develop more quickly here just because of Spitzer’s history of using broadcast TV as a lightly subversive vehicle to capture the undercurrent of a national pulse? Probably. But there’s potential here. Right now, it’s the kind of series that could build a silly, semi-fruitful C-story out of Matt (much like St. Denis Medical itself) failing to find a pulse. For a freshman broadcast comedy, maybe that’s enough.