Allison Tolman in NBC’s Medical Sitcom

Justin Spitzer is the great 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 can be paid to his ever-expanding resumé of comic critiques of eroding institutions. 

In fact, it’s the muted anger and the shortage of profanity that allow Spitzer to do something borderline Chayefsky-esque inside a broadcast television landscape currently higher fitted to Big Bang Theory spinoffs, mismatched family sitcoms and Abbott Elementary (the last successful so elusive, ABC has done nothing in any respect 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 employees and automobile manufacturing executives to a midsized hospital in non-Portland, Oregon. Just like the early installments of Superstore and American Auto, the three episodes of St. Denis Medical sent to critics come across as just a little toothless, steering away from scathing commentary on our often dysfunctional healthcare system in favor of familiar plotlines about egomaniacal doctors, overworked nurses and wacky patient misadventures.

Still, the ensemble solid could be very quickly ok to make St. Denis Medical price trying out, or at the least checking in on after allowing it time to fine-tune its voice.

St. Denis is a so-called “safety net hospital,” providing take care of everybody no matter 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 decided to spice up 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 relies on watching an excessive amount of House. Alex (Allison Tolman), a mother who struggles to take care of work-life balance, is the newly promoted supervising nurse, with Kahyun Kim’s Serena as her spirituality-curious second-in-command. The newest 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 seem within the episodes I’ve seen, round out the ensemble.

Ruben Fleischer, a daily director on Superstore, sets the St. Denis Medical visual template, which is generally 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 very good one for a medical comedy, allowing for transient beats of handheld intensity when patients arrive in emergency situations and facilitating an easy connection between the characters and the camera in the course of the obligatory confessional interviews. 

The latter becomes even easier when you might have a solid this personable. Tolman is especially good because the everywoman at the middle of this assemblage of wacky medics: exasperated but caring, dedicated to her occupation yet vaguely agog by all the pieces 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 within the pilot, St. Denis Medical seems to not get that while a bumbling newbie archetype like Leeper’s Matt will be very funny in a workplace context, the humor doesn’t apply in medical situations where lives hang within the balance. But subsequent chapters refine Matt’s oddness, and when the stakes are lower — as when he questions the religion of the hospital chaplain, or tries to get two patients from a close-by prison to resolve their differences — his naivete plays significantly better. Similarly, there’s a broadness to McLendon-Covey’s Joyce within the premiere — she tries to encourage employees with a cheerleading routine ending in a cartwheel — that subsequently gets toned down.

Nevertheless, I’m undecided any character is broader than Lawson’s perpetually oblivious Bruce, but nothing I’ve seen to date has made me laugh as hard as his work within the episode revealing the character’s fear of needles.

Still, that plot, nevertheless appealingly wacky, reflects an overall softness within the series’ gaze. “Doctor is afraid of needles,” “doctor doesn’t imagine in office superstitions,” “nurse might miss kid’s school production of Mamma Mia!” and “doctor really likes milkshakes” are storylines that may and do generate some chuckles. However it’s hard not to note missed opportunities for meatier examinations of, as an example, 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 higher than some other show on TV — is only a tossed-off punchline.

Is St. Denis Medical still the autumn’s most ambitious network sitcom? I suppose? Man, that’s a low bar. Will a sharper perspective eventually emerge? Possibly. Is it unfair to expect it to develop more quickly here simply because of Spitzer’s history of using broadcast TV as a calmly subversive vehicle to capture the undercurrent of a national pulse? Probably. But there’s potential here. Right away, it’s the form of series that might construct a silly, semi-fruitful C-story out of Matt (very similar to St. Denis Medical itself) failing to seek out a pulse. For a freshman broadcast comedy, possibly that’s enough.