‘The Resident’ Bosses Reveal How Medical Stories Would Have Changed in Season 7

If The Resident had continued for a seventh season, the medical stories likely would have looked a bit different.

TV Insider recently spoke with co-creator Amy Holden Jones and executive producer Andrew Chapman about what would have happened if The Resident hadn’t been canceled, and they revealed that there would have been a shift in the medical stories they told.

At the end of Season 6, Chastain was saved by the governor after they saved his life. As a result, “the other hospitals would’ve not been on such a great financial footing,” noted Jones. “If you did it today, that would be the story, is that the public hospital would be flooded because the other ones, if there are Medicare and Medicaid cuts are going to be struggling financially a lot because hospitals rely on those. But Chastain has to treat everybody.”

She also said that as a result, the show would’ve been a bit more ER-heavy. “You’d have surgeries and ER. A lot of that would’ve been more frenetic than it was and less easygoing than it was because their ER would’ve been flooded with people and they would’ve been under a lot of pressure. So you would’ve had a lot of fast-moving stories and more stories per episode,” she explained. “We were already talking about that. We had a format where we had A, B, C medical stories, particularly A and B ones that you really followed most of the whole show. Whereas in the pilot there were many stories that went in and out in A story.”

Chapman added that he and Jones, in Seasons 5 and 6, talked about “how much fun it is to write an episode with a lot of short bursts of scenes as opposed to longer, more complicated scenes. And I think it’s a truism of shows as they go through seasons that they become soapier, they rely less on concept and they rely more on relationship stories. That’s just the way television is, and you can’t fight that. Going to shorter, faster scenes would’ve been an interesting way to go. And I think adding more patients with faster bits of problems as opposed to longer A, B, C stories would be fun.”

They would’ve also continued to do the season-long thriller stories the show was known for since the beginning. “I think the Lily [Violett Beane] story from Season 1 was one of our very best obviously. And you get a chance to look back after 100 episodes and think, ‘Which of these would I watch again and again and which did I really love the most?’ And for me, they were ones that combined the emotion of the doctors for the patients and the emotional story of that thriller arc or individual patient with the stories of the lives of the doctors,” Jones said.

The EPs noted that people brought in things happening in medicine to discuss in the writers’ room.
For example, the “One Bullet” episode, which saw the resources that go into treating a gunshot wound, “deals with our themes of the money and medicine,” according to Jones. “It’s really fascinating to see how different medical shows pick something that they follow to make it their thing. So, I mean, The Pitt, I think what they’re doing is the impact of how hard the life is on the doctors themselves, which is a great thing that they can run with forever. And ours was not so much how hard it was on the doctors themselves — though we dealt with that at times — as how good doctors have to fight against a system that so often is not benefiting patients.”

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