vulture festival 2024

Who Is Making the Documentary on St. Denis Medical?

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The set of St. Denis Medical is two steps away from being a real hospital. At Vulture Festival, the cast and creators said many of the props are real decommissioned medical equipment, and many of the background actors are former medical professionals. “It’s the cheapest, easiest way to make it look like a hospital,” said co-creator Eric Ledgin. “It gives me the same feeling I had when I walked on the Superstore set. It’s this uncanny feeling of walking onto a soundstage and being like, This is amazing! It’s like I’m at a Target! Somehow it feels both really incredible and also terribly mundane at the same time.” Since the show premiered, Mekki Leeper, who plays Matt, has been peeping the show’s reception on social media. “On TikTok, there are a bunch of nurses who are commenting that our stethoscopes are apparently really expensive, fancy stethoscopes,” he said. “They’re marveling and going, ‘Oh my God, I saw six in one scene!’” “Meanwhile, we lose them all the time,” Allison Tolman interjected.

All this verisimilitude is right there on the screen. But for whom? St. Denis Medical is a faux documentary, but whomst is documenting? Not even star David Alan Grier knows: “I wanna know who’s doing the documentary. That’s what I wanna know.” Ledgin and his co-creator Justin Spitzer aren’t worried about figuring out the answer just yet. “There are so many docuseries about life behind the ER or life in the trauma room,” Spitzer said. Tolman has a different head canon for who who’s filming the doc, guessing it’s “probably someone that [hospital administrator] Joyce roped in for a couple bucks.” Ledgin has the final answer: “We can worry later.”

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Who Is Filming the Documentary on St. Denis Medical?