The episode marks the first one under the helm of new showrunner Allen MacDonald, who is “so excited” about the hospital’s fresh recruits, played by new series regulars Sarah Ramos ( Parenthood ) and Darren Barnet ( Never Have I Ever ).
The cast additions come following Dominic Rains’ exit as Dr. Crockett Marcel , whose departure will be addressed in the premiere, although the character will not be seen, MacDonald tells TVLine.
Below, MacDonald previews the “fast-moving, suspenseful” season opener, how the new docs shake things up, and Ripley’s damaged relationships. The EP also talks about how his time working on ER prepared him for taking the reins on Med .
TVLINE | What is it like coming into a show that’s this far in? How do you prepare as the new showrunner? Did you binge watch all the previous seasons? Yes, I did. I had to very quickly become a scholar of Chicago Med , and so I had to watch the show from beginning all the way up through the end of Season 9. And, obviously, I very much enjoyed that experience and process. I got very excited to be able to, for lack of a better phrase, play in the sandbox of this world, creatively.
TVLINE | Coming in, what was your approach to the storylines? My approach to the storylines was that I wanted to continue what had already kind of been set up as a foundation of the show: to tell really emotional, medicine-driven stories that have a real human underpinning to them, because something that I like to do and that this show has always done very well is to make people cry. I come into this job as a huge fan of the show ER , which was very formative to me as someone who was an aspiring writer. I remember just being addicted to the feeling of watching that show every week, and it making me laugh and cry, and sometimes in the same scene. I felt that when I was educating myself by watching all the episodes of Chicago Med , that this was a show that did that and that would give me the ability to take what had been set up and take it further. I could hop onboard this train that is already running so smoothly and bring my brand of emotional storytelling to the table.
TVLINE | You spent some time working on ER , right, as a researcher? I did, but I came on as an intern, basically. I was hired by the researcher to work as a research intern. I would go through newspaper articles from all the major publications and look for medical stories, cull them for medical stories and then pack it together for all the writers. Then that eventually turned into a job as an assistant to one of the writers. Then the next season — I was there Seasons 4 and 5 — I worked for a different writer. So I was not a writer. I wasn’t evolved, creatively, but I helped with the research aspect of it when I first got there. But it would be wrong to say I was a writer on the show or was involved in the writing process at all.
TVLINE | But clearly, you have some experience in the medical procedural genre. I do, and it’s very exciting to get this opportunity because ER is one of my favorite shows. I always wanted to do a show like that. I wrote a medical pilot about life in an ER. But my career took me in a different direction. So when this opportunity came up, I’m like, “Oh, this is a perfect fit for me.”
TVLINE | Turning specifically to Chicago Med , can you set the scene for how the season picks up? There is a one-month time jump. The season premiere is framed around what’s called a mass-casualty incident. There is a commuter ship that is docked in Navy Pier and a smaller vessel collides into. The larger one fills with water and, in turn, capsizes, and a lot of people get trapped inside. So all the victims of that accident are transported, mostly, to Gaffney. It’s an all-hands-on-deck sort of situation. We just kind of dive right into that while at the same time catching up with our characters and dealing with some of the threads that were purposefully left dangling at the end of last season, like who attacked Pawel, Dr. Charles’ relationship with Liliana, where things stand between Dr. Ripley and Dr. Hannah Asher. We just delve into all those questions and things amid the backdrop of this very fast-moving, suspenseful, stressful mass-casualty incident.
TVLINE | What can you tease about the fallout of the Ripley cliffhanger and how it’s impacting his relationship with not only Hannah, but also with Charles? That was my favorite scene in the finale is when Dr. Charles finally kind of gets frustrated with Ripley and tells him that he’s kind of done. The answer to that question is Dr. Ripley is dealing with a lot of damage to a lot of his personal relationships.
TVLINE | How is Hannah handling what’s going on from her perspective? I talked to Jessy Schram about it at TCA Press Tour and how Hannah didn’t speak up when that all went down, but she made the case that even Ripley didn’t speak up for himself. I guess the best way to answer that is Ripley was not and has not been fully transparent about what went down with Pawel. Because of that, there’s a real kind of iciness between them as the season begins in the premiere.
TVLINE | Ripley is a fairly new character to us still. He’s only been around for a season, so how much more are you exploring his background and his past in the upcoming season? He is definitely a new character. He has only actually been on the show for 13 episodes because of the truncated season last year. I think that Season 9 did an excellent job of laying out Ripley’s backstory and that he had an impulse control issue that Dr. Charles had treated him for as a teenager. We are not going to be delving much more into the past except to make references to things that we already had found out in Season 9, but that some of those impulse control issues will kind of pop up with Ripley in the present.
TVLINE | You also have two new doctors coming in this season, played by Darren Barnet and Sarah Ramos. What are their characters like? And what is their dynamic like with the rest of the characters? I’m so excited about these two new characters… A hospital near Gaffney will be closing down and there is an expectation that Gaffney will absorb that overflow and their patient numbers will go up. So in order to have some help with that issue in the ED, Goodwin hires Dr. Caitlin Lenox (Ramos) to come in. Dr. Lenox very quickly does what she can to assume control of a lot of aspects of the ED, which Dr. Archer is not pleased about because he feels like he had everything under control. Lenox has a military background like Archer, and she has a very strict, black-and-white outlook on everything. She’s there to make the ED more efficient. She doesn’t believe so much in being friends with the people she works with because she wants to maintain her authoritative integrity. So suffice it to say, there are some bruised egos and hurt feelings and some frustration with the arrival of Dr. Lenox.
Darren’s character is named Dr. John Frost, and he is a pediatrician who we meet in the premiere because he brings in a patient that he feels is not getting proper care at the moment at the hospital that he works at, which, not coincidentally, is the same hospital that is closing down in a matter of days. So there’s some chaos there. Dr. Frost brings a patient in, gets to know Maggie Lockwood and develops some relationships with the staff there. He is someone who is very protective of children and loves kids, is very much able to speak to them on a level. He can get on their level in the best way possible. He believes deeply that children, from small children all the way up to a 17-year-old, deserve to be involved in the decisions around their own medical cases. So he has a little bit of a distrust of parents sometimes if he senses that they are not being fully honest with their children about their medical conditions. There’s reasons that Dr. Frost decided to become a pediatrician, which stem from him not feeling that he was protected by his own parents as a child.
TVLINE | Anything you can tease that’s coming up for Sharon? Something that’s very exciting and I know [S. Epatha Merkerson] was very excited to do is that because it’s all hands on deck in the season premiere, Sharon, who was an RN and [is] still an RN because her license is still active, jumps into the ED and works with the doctors on patients because they need everybody they possibly can.
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