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This is Link Allen. Noah Wiley plays a doctor on TV's The Pit. Dr. John Lapouk is a real doctor reporting for Sunday morning. Guess what happened when they got to talking?
Hello? Hello. Pleasure. Pleasure is mine. Thank you so much.
My pleasure. Where are we? We're over there.
Okay. You get the two cameras, I get one. How you doing?
Now? Phenomenal. Stays in the can. About an hour ago I was pulling my hair up. Really, long day.
Longish. You know I wonder if you were actually a physician. How would you be handling, do you think, the physical and emotional toll of it all? I'd be compartmentalizing it like you guys do. I'm I'm I vacillate between feeling 54 years old.
and feeling like I'm in a situation that I've Dreamt of and prayed for and hoped for for so long that it mitigates exhaustion, it mitigates everything, just being able to be here and play with these people. How long have you been praying for it? Yeah. for an experience that was as creatively and as Energetically satisfying as ER was, long time. And I've found aspects of what that show gave me on other jobs with other casts in other places, but not quite.
quite the same, not quite like this. When ER ended, if I had come to you and said, What are the odds that someday you're going to do another medical show? What would you have said? Bam, 0%. What changed?
COVID, you know, COVID changed everything, certainly for me in thinking about. There being another story to tell in healthcare, a contemporary story, a contemporary American story. And one that was being reported on but wasn't really being embraced, which is to sort of play up the fact that we have two different health care systems in this country depending on where you live and how much money you have. And that showed itself in stark relief when you looked at the numbers of who was most affected by COVID. On top of that, Essential workers, people who are forced to go to work every day because we couldn't function as a country without them.
all those people going to work every day, putting themselves and their families at risk by doing the jobs that were being asked of them, I found to be incredibly poignant. And those were the same people who had been inspired to go into those jobs by watching ER ten years earlier.
So I was getting a lot of mail from people on the front line saying We could sure use Dr. Carter out here or This is really awful. And I come home at night and thank you for giving me something to watch or think about other than my day. And I just was really overwhelmed by getting that kind of Mail from people that I thought were doing such heroic work while I was at home feeling totally useless. I took care of hospitalized patients on the COVID wards in April of 2020.
And I remember back then you walked out at seven o'clock, clang, clang, clang, and everybody was ringing bells. That changed at some point, didn't it? It did, and that I don't I'm sure some people in the beginning felt honored by that kind of attention, but at a certain point, I think that. Became a really annoying sound to hear as you were leaving your shift. But it was also that the public's opinion about.
Healthcare and healthcare workers shifted.
Well, that was the other thing, is that ER at one point. Commanded such a large percentage of the American viewing audience that you felt that if you put a medical fact on that show, you could pretty much take it to the bank that that would be embraced as a medical fact. And you could go to your doctor and say, hey, I saw this on ER, is this true? And they would say, absolutely, because that's how it happens. And it would be.
A point of conversation and a point of accessibility between a physician and a patient to be able to reference a piece of drama on TV. And that became less and less. uh credible as Shows played fast and loose with medicine and played fast and loose with some facts. And then we get into COVID where misinformation is being spouted all over the place, and nobody's really. Putting a circle around an objective medical fact anymore and saying, no, this is real.
Like, vaccinations work. They're working really well and they're saving a lot of lives right now. Or masks really work. Germ theory is a real thing. This isn't up for debate.
We don't have two opinions on this. This is science. That was super frustrating to sit home and watch all they get called into question.
So I just sort of felt like: wouldn't it be nice if we could do a show that became a little bit of a standard bearer for the medical community again and re-established what it looks and feels and smells like to be in this environment and what a medical fact is. How does the pit? Help that problem. I mean, you know, you're mapping it out. You have 15 episodes.
What was the strategy? The thesis At the heart of it was let's focus on a really great doctor who is Unaware of how In trouble he is. He's been doing this for so long, and he probably should have left a couple years ago, but the need kept him working. The fear that You know, he'd be keeping his team would be at risk if he quit. All those reasons that make you stay on a little longer than you maybe should past the point of burnout.
He's there. And I wanted to We wanted to show the fragility of the medical system and personified by one practitioner who's at his breaking point. To underscore the fragility of the system is commensurate with the fragility of our healthcare workers' mental attitudes. And then, when he goes down, the whole system goes down, so to speak.
So, that was the exercise. Can we just sort of reduce this whole problem to being one hospital, one physician on his worst day when hits the fan? And from there, you know, it branched out into. Let's talk to every expert we can talk to right now in every aspect of the medical spectrum and find out what's happening, find out what they're up against, find out what would be beneficial to put on television to help them in their work, find out what would be really bad to put on TV that would be counterproductive to their work. And um Let's tackle some storylines that we weren't able to do on ER because these weren't part of our lexicon 15 years ago.
We weren't talking about fentanyl overdoses, we weren't talking about trans rights, we weren't talking about mass shootings. Let's see if we can bring this into the 21st century.
So the authenticity shows, the research shows. I mean, as a physician, I was just blown away. By how real it was, the specificity of it. How important, I mean, you have this emergency room. I walked in there, I said, Well, I'm in a hospital, I'm in an emergency room, where's my first patient?
How important? Was it to you to have that authenticity? I mean, it served as a canvas upon which to paint your stories. Because of the nature of this storytelling, 15 consecutive hours of one shift, and we barely ever leave the footprint of our soundstage, it became really important to have the entire set feel like in a totally immersive experience. That when you go in there, You open a drawer, everything that's supposed to be in the drawer is there.
You open a closet, everything that's supposed to be in the closet is there.
So there's no. Imagination necessary. There's no pretend. Everything feels real and is exactly where it should go. And there's also no music, right?
And to me, I found that fascinating because in a scary movie, how do you know what's scary?
Well, the music changes and there's a close-up. But when in life there's no music change and there's no close-up, you have to do that all yourself. That was a big fight. That was one of the largest creative hurdles that we had to overcome because it was a speculative move. Nobody knew whether or not, if you take the music out, you're going to have the ability to create tension or drama or.
Or anything else. Scott Gemmel, to his credit, had written two ER episodes back in the 90s where he'd pulled the soundtrack out and knew that it worked really well.
So he was the only one that had confidence that this was going to work. And it wasn't until we saw the very first episode, fully cut, fully mixed, without music, that we realized: oh no, the tension in the doctor's voices, the ambient sounds, the sounds of crying, the sounds of screaming, that creates tension environmentally. And we do a little bit of a sound score, a little bit of an industrial kind of noise that comes in and out every once in a while, but that's it. That's all the augmentation. I read that you had a boot camp?
Yeah, we uh We, well, because this is a fairly young ensemble and certainly none of us have ever been doctors before, and we all had to start at a pretty high level of proficiency, it was really important that we came in a few weeks before we started shooting, learn how to put on your gloves. Learn how to say the words, learn how to hold the instruments, learn how to move and think like a doctor, talk to doctors, go to the hospital. I will Say that you know, if this had been the ER cast and we'd asked him to do three weeks of boot camp, he would have gotten six class clowns screwing around, not listening, you know, playing with the gloves, making them into balloons, doing all sorts of crazy stuff. These guys. These were not class clowns.
These were first students. They were top students.
Well, it all shows. They picked this stuff up so fast that as the old veteran who thought, I've got such an advantage, I was like, oh, wow, hey, I got to pick it up a little bit. These guys are really adept. We'll have more from our Sunday morning extended interview after this break.
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Arvana. Delivery fees may apply. I would love to go into your character, right? Because You have a whole spectrum of behavior. I talked to the medical students about, you know, there's a wall between yourself and the patient.
You don't want to make it too thick because then you can miss out on all the good stuff and so do the patients. If you make it too thin and porched, you can get nailed emotionally. And over the 15 episodes, I saw it like an accordion with you. Did you do that intentionally? Yeah, yeah, you want, I mean, his mask is slipping all day long and he's getting triggered all day long by some pretty horrific flashbacks.
And that mask gets harder and harder to maintain. That professional distance that you're referring to gets harder and harder to calibrate until you just feel naked to the world, you know. But what comes across, especially to me, because I've had those emotional moments, is You're a human being. You're vulnerable and it's hard to be a human being. When you're in a leadership position, when you're, you know, when everybody's looking at you to know.
Literally had to set the tone, right? How should we feel, doctor? You Yeah. You can't lose it in those moments. It's so unfair to have to keep that professional demeanor intact in those situations.
It was fun to try to Play. Your mother did keep it intact. Yeah. She was a nurse, right? Yes, you know, once and always, like Marines.
And my mother, who's now 80, still, you know. keeps her skills in her in her um Or license up, just in case. My mom was a 10 years OR nurse, 10 years head orthopedic nurse at Kaiser Hospital in Hollywood, all through my growing up. And, you know, mom's at the hospital all day. I got to walk home from school until mom gets home.
Hey, mom, can you drive me to practice? Hey, mom, what's for dinner? That was mom. Mom was always there when she was there. And then 35 years later, she's watching an episode of The Pit and comes over and says.
That rocked me. I was listening to you name those names of the patients that you had lost, and it triggered something. I started remembering. The four-year-old kid and the gangbanger, and the mother of two. And she just starts listing all these names of patients that she had seen die when she was practicing.
And uh I said, Mom, I've never heard these stories before. And she goes, oh, yeah. And I said, When the four-year-old died, you know, when was that? And she goes, Oh, your brother was probably four at the time. I think that's probably why it hit me so hard.
And I just remember thinking like so You know, you did that and then you came home and made us dinner and didn't talk about it. You did that and then drove us to baseball practice? Like, how do you do that? How did you do that? And she'd say, well, that's sort of what you do, you know.
Why do you think she didn't bring it home? It might have helped her. I think, and you could probably speak to this better than I can. True. We don't have a frame of reference for that at home.
That is something that she shared with her professional colleagues, the people who understood what she was doing all day, who were doing it as well. That was her club. Those were her people. We were her kids. And She didn't show us that stuff.
You know, in the old days, it was kind of suck it up. And it was a little bit of like, I went through it, so you got to go through it. You know, this is your training. Days of the Giants. We were up for four days straight.
Yeah, you know, in the old days, you know, we would be. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it became a badge of honor to survive it. Oh, and you didn't want to admit that you were not up to the task or afraid or suffering under the weight load. That would have been.
You know, admitting failure or cowardice or weakness. And I think to a certain extent that stigma still exists. Right, this huge stigma.
So that brings us to your meltdown. Can you bring me along that journey that led To the meltdown, because I thought that was a very, very important moment because it did show that you were vulnerable, that you're a human being, this could happen, it's okay, you can recover from that and still function.
So tell me about it, because that was a carefully planned-out journey. We wanted it to be. Everything's going crazy. We need the hero to come in on his white horse and save the day. and then suddenly the horse comes in without its rider.
Where is the rider? is on the floor. Like The heroes on the floor? How can that be?
Well It's not hard to figure out when you watch it. Um It's the deconstruction of our hero to show the vulnerability of the human being, which underscores the heroism of the fact that he's going out and doing it again with all of these Achilles heels. I loved the theme throughout, to me, the entire 15-episode series. empathy, empathy, empathy. And you you show it At all levels, you know, physician, you have to have empathy for your colleagues, empathy for the patient.
Tell me an empathy for yourself. You know, yeah. Yeah, I think empathy is in rather short supply in the world these days. And I mean, I actually saw something that was ridiculous where The concept of empathy was being taken and perverted into being a toxic trait. Because if I'm empathizing so much with you, then I am not objectively helping you.
I'm projecting what I assume your feelings to be onto you, and I'm not really looking at you. That it almost is a. Filter through which people are looking and not getting clarity, which I think is crazy. People have so many different definitions of empathy. I thought that the character who had a moment that was astonishingly empathic.
was the neurodivergent character. What is her name? Mel King. Mel King. Mel, yeah, Mel King.
Mel King. And after um Another physician doesn't do so well in an encounter with an autistic patient. She comes in. And she knows the difference between empathy and sympathy. She knows that the sound is distracting.
She turns, closes the door, she turns down the lights. I thought that was stunning, and he responds. Yeah. Yeah, that's unfortunate. You know, there's so many.
terrible stories of people that are severely autistic or nonverbal, being violently assaulted by police officers and people that don't understand quite what their behaviors are, misinterpreting behaviors. And a lot of the things that are taught to law enforcement about how to dominate a situation and how to put somebody on their back foot are all the wrong things you would do with somebody who's neurodivergent.
So sometimes you can create a really horrible situation very quickly by not having that knowledge at your fingertips. But yeah, we also wanted to show that neurodivergent people uh like dr king have A wonderful role to play in our society, in our hospitals, in many, many professions. And sometimes that actually becomes a little bit of a superpower. In terms of Focus in terms of connection, in terms of data research, you know. A lot of different things.
You talk about a superpower. I always think, you know. Empathy is your superpower as a physician. And if you actually listen to a patient long enough they'll actually tell you what's the matter. That's the problem with getting to spend less and less time with patients.
The more patients you have to treat per hour because of the billing cycle and because of the overload of patients coming in, the less you're able to make those connections, the more you're going to be. Missing those clues and the moral injury of wanting to perform a certain type of medicine a certain way and not being able to because the deck is stacked against you. Not just today, but tomorrow and the next day and the next day with no hope in sight. I think that, that is soul crushing. You know, how do you maintain a sense of empathy without a sense of hope that you're getting ahead of the problem in some way?
It's if it's this tide that can never be stemmed. I don't know that you can keep your empathy intact. Without a sense of Yeah, I've hope.
Well, it's not just physicians and the healthcare profession, right? The entire world is aching for empathy. And I wonder if there's a message for the world in the pit. I mean, not to be too grandiose, but I think there is. I think there's a message in putting a spotlight back on people who for a living do service and angelic work.
You know, it It's not everybody that can go to work and, for not a lot of money, spend 12 to 14 hours. cleaning, wiping, caring. bandaging, consoling. You know, people at their worst moment. You're seeing everybody's worst day four times an hour, 12 hours a day.
five days a week. And the aggregate toll of being witness to that is extreme. And yet The willingness to go back day in and day out is so heroic.
So, to make a show that isn't about a mob boss or a crystal meth dealer or a kingpin, but you know. Everyday individuals going to work try to do the best they can with all the personal problems, with their own aging parents, with their own problematic children, with their own bills to pay. still showing up every day. I think that's just. Uh uh Primed for great drama and been lacking in television.
So, happy to put the show back on that spotlights those people. I want to turn to season two. I want you to be able to tease. Season two. I mean, you hit the target very well predicting measles.
We did well last year. We talked to a lot of infectious disease experts. They were telling us about vaccination rates dropping and what we might see. More incidents of, and we got lucky with measles. That was easier to do last year.
How bad for this year? This year is harder. This year, you know, these cuts in Medicaid and Medicare are going to be crazy. As I'm sure you're well aware, the closures of rural hospitals are going to overpopulate urban hospitals. People are gonna lose their health insurance.
People are going to delay care. People are gonna continue to come in sicker, higher acuity cases. They're gonna be more volatile when they come in. That's gonna put more of a burden on staff. We have a nursing shortage.
We've got a boarding crisis. All this stuff is sort of moving towards this perfect storm of unsustainability. You're an executive producer. You are a director. You are a writer.
Do you do food services also? Only at home. Only at home. I wash dishes too at home. Is this about control?
This is about me recognizing that there were two points in my career during the pandemic and during this last work stoppage for the Writers and Actors Strike. Those were the two moments when The flow of my career were interrupted and I Wasn't used to it. You know, I've spent most of my life working on sets, and that's a big part of who I am. I have become to realize. And when I couldn't work, And didn't have a place to be creative and didn't have a community of people to share my experience with, it really rattled me.
in a way that That rattled me. And I remember saying to my wife, like, I don't think I work for money. I think I work for health, my own health. Like, I think this is where I get my orientation. And without it, I'm not sure I know what I do on this earth.
And so in those moments, I just started thinking, wow, if I never get to work again. Or if I do get to work again, what do I want that work to feel like? What would I want it to be like? And all I could think about was ER and how great those first 15 years of my career were because it felt like I was with a group of people that really cared about what we were doing. We were doing work that was very meaningful.
It was resonating not just throughout the country, but throughout the world. And I loved coming to this studio every day and make-believing. And suddenly, that's what I just wanted to do again.
So I feel like, to answer the question in a long-winded way, yes, I'm wearing a lot of hats, but it's only because I'm so fing. I'm excited to be here and I don't want to give it up and I just love doing all the jobs and I love telling stories.
Someone asked me today. how I was feeling and I thought I I don't know that I I don't remember feeling this happy recently. I'm I'm the happiest I've been in a long time. Does that surprise you? It just confirms, you know, it confirms all my worst suspicions about myself, which is that I really need all this.
Wow. I'm Jane Pauley. Thank you for listening. And for more of our extended interviews, follow and listen to Sunday Morning on the free Odyssey app. or wherever you get your podcasts.
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