STRONG MEDICINE
The writer behind House and The Good Doctor enjoys a good challenge
Not long after the dark and quirky medical drama House debuted, creator David Shore was asked if he knew how the series would end.
The show would eventually become a global phenomenon, lasting eight seasons on Fox and Global.
But by that point, the London, Ont.-born Shore had been working within U.S. network TV for nearly a decade and harboured no misconceptions about how it all worked. So, early on, when asked how House would end, he told people it would likely end the way most U.S. network TV shows did: quickly and unceremoniously.
“One morning, I will get a phone call from the network telling me that the ratings are down and the show is ending,” Shore said in an interview with Postmedia at the Banff World Media Festival last week before receiving the Hollywood Impact Award. “It didn’t turn out that way and I was very fortunate. But that’s generally how American network television works: You keep wringing it out until you get everything out of it that you can.”
Shore did get to end House on his own terms in 2012 with a well-received finale that he also directed. But even in this golden age of television, where creators are granted more freedom than ever before, Shore is still in the habit of taking each season as it comes.
So when he adapted ABC’s The Good Doctor from the 2013 South Korean medical drama of the same name, he did not have a lengthy, multiple-season story arc in mind. Even after the series became a surprise hit for ABC — thewrap.com says it ended its first season in March as ABC’s highest-rated firstyear drama in 13 years — Shore has continued his old-school habit of thinking of storylines one episode at a time.
“I still see it as an episodic series,” Shore says. “There are arcs and character arcs and things I want to do with the character, but I don’t view it as one complete story, which I don’t think life is. Individuals lives have things within it that have a beginning, middle and end, but the life itself doesn’t.”
Still, season 1 did end with a bit of a cliffhanger. The Good Doctor tells the story of Dr. Shaun Murphy (Freddie Highmore), a young surgeon with autism and savant syndrome. As season 1 ended, Murphy’s mentor, biggest supporter and former hospital president Dr. Aaron Glassman (Richard Schiff ) learned his brain cancer was operable, not terminal as previously thought. But this good news is offset by Murphy making a near-fatal mistake on a patient during surgery. The season ended with Mur- phy and Glassman going to see the hospital’s ambitious chief surgeon and new hospital president, Marcus Andrews (Hill Harper), and admit his mistake. This, however, might mean the end for both, since Glassman staked his reputation on having hired Murphy. Their relationship will be continue as a major focus in season 2, Shore says.
“We’re going to deal with all of the fallout from Dr. Glassman’s illness,” he says. “I think it’s interesting to see one of our characters become a patient in a realistic way; to draw it out and explore what life is really like when you’re sick and sick not just with something that can be remedied with one piece of surgery. I also liked the idea, to some extent, of putting Shaun into the mentor position rather than the mentee position.”
For the most part, though, Shore does not seem anxious to mess with a winning formula, another hallmark of network TV. Season 2 will be “more of the same,” he says.
“It’s still going to be about Dr. Shaun Murphy, about his challenges,” Shore says.
Shore initially set out to be a lawyer before turning his attention to TV writing, with early stints with Paul Haggis and Paul Gross for the CTV show Due South. He went on to such shows as NYPD Blue, The Practice and the Canadian hit Traders before executive producing Haggis’s legal drama, Family Law. A year after that show ended, he took the reins on House, which won him an Emmy for writing in 2005.
While network TV may seem limiting compared to the anything-goes vibe of prestige cable, Shore says the pros have greatly outweighed the cons in his career.
“Yes, you are limited in your storytelling, on the one hand,” he says. “On the other hand, you are reaching a larger audience, which as a storyteller is a wonderful thing.
“The limitations of network TV, for me anyways, have not been that great,” he says. “They’ve not been bad at all. There was never a story on House that they told me I can’t tell and there’s never been story on the Good Doctor that they’ve told me I couldn’t tell. I can’t show nudity and I can’t swear. But I don’t view that as a limitation to the story I want to tell.”