“Something with plague cat.”
That’s the instruction the St. Denis Medical writers room received from co-creator Eric Ledgin that spawned a recent episode of the freshman series titled “Billy the Buffalo and Matty the Kid,” about an emotional support animal that is let loose into the halls of the hospital.
He pulled it from a story he’d seen on the internet about a cat who’d, as his vague directive suggests, given someone the plague. It’s one of many places he finds inspiration for the range of humor — from “dark” to “oddball,” as Ledgin describes — on the NBC mockumentary, which is a departure from the rather dramatic depictions of the emergency room audiences often see on television.
“I’ve had many experiences in the ER, whether it was for me or my sister-in-law or a friend or a girlfriend…all of those situations had funny aspects to them,” Ledgin told Deadline at the SXSW Studio in Austin, Texas. “To me, they were funny because of the seriousness of the expectation of going into a hospital, and then the reality of what it’s actually like.”
Watch on Deadline
The series has already been renewed for Season 2, and it’ll return for additional episodes of the first season on March 11. Ledgin assures he has “plans” for the second installment, at least “until the writers make those plans better or talk me out of them, which they’re also able to do very effectively.”
Of the second season, he added: “I want to keep on the same course as we were on Season 1 in the sense of having moments where we push the characters’ relationships further along, but also just having every episode be story unto itself and not feeling like it’s too twisty turny. I think that, especially being part of the mockumentary format, you want to be somewhat truthful to reality…I’m hoping to keep the energy similar to what we did in Season 1, but we have more confidence now. We know the characters better. We’ll maybe get out of the hospital a little more.”
Check out the full video above to see Ledgin’s conversation with Deadline at the SXSW Studio, where he delves further into the series, the revival of the network comedy, and shooting in Los Angeles at a time when production continues to move elsewhere.
The Deadline Studio at SXSW runs March 7-10, where the cast and creatives behind the best and buzziest titles in this year’s lineup sit down with Deadline’s festival team to discuss their movies and the paths they took to get to Austin, Texas.