David E. Kelley’s newest series may not have the quirkiness or humor of his most famous shows which include “Ally McBeal” and “The Practice.”
But in “Monday Mornings,” which starts on TNT Feb 4, it’s because he’s sticking closely to the source material, which is from another star on Turner Broadcasting, a book by CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
“It tonally probably is a little more serious than my other projects,” Kelley said at the TV critics press tour Friday. But he adds, “this came to me originally as a book, and I tried to be true to the tone of the book.”
“At first I had a reservation of the project itself because I had done a medical show before,” Kelley said. “ The terrain sounded a little familiar with ‘Chicago Hope.’ Then I read the book and saw that it was completely different. The characters were different. The stories were different, and the staple of this book was these [Morbidity and Mortality] meetings. It felt like fertile storytelling ground, and I probably was drawn to it because it was different.”
In the series, which stars among others Ving Rhames, Alfred Molina, Jamie Bamber, Jennifer Finnigan and Bill Irwin in an ensemble reproducing a fictional hospital in Portland, Ore., the doctors gather for a frank review of their patient care the past week. (It seems to have much less of the romantic sidestories of “Grey’s Anatomy” and the like).
Those meetings are “a hallowed space in medicine,” Gupta says. “It’s a place that very few people know about and even fewer people ever get to see.”
“This project only came to being when I got an assurance from Sanjay that he would stay with it,” Kelley says. “I wanted to keep the voice that came with it, being Dr. Gupta, and he assured me that he would not abandon us and he would stay with us. He’s lived up to that promise. And it’s been great for all of us.”
Indeed said Finnigan, “from a character standpoint, I mean, it’s been so great for the actors to have him around. And certainly from a medical standpoint, during the pilot, he came up to us and said, ‘Can I teach you how to clip an aneurysm on a cow brain?’ We’re like, ‘Sanjay’s going to teach us how to clip an aneurysm. Absolutely.’ It’s been great.”