Tiera Skovbye

OF ‘NURSES’ ON NBC

As “Nurses” settles into its regular time period after its December preview showings, what do you think about its timeliness, given the coronavirus pandemic?

When we started making Season 1, COVID-9 wasn’t around, but it was still exciting to be able to do a show about nurses and to honor them. I don’t think any of us quite realized how important the stories were that we were telling until we started filming Season 2 (for the show’s home market, Canada) We started that prepandemic, then we had a four-month hiatus and then started up again while everything was still going on.

In working on Season 2, has the pandemic been folded into the stories as a subject, as other medical shows have been doing lately?

Well, everything had already been written, so it was a matter of this being something happening in the world now and how we acknowledge it. Without giving too much away, some of the storylines definitely changed, because it’s not something a medical drama can ignore.

What sort of research did you do for this role?

I didn’t know when I got cast what it was going to be like on the set, whether they would have someone for us there (as a technical adviser). I have a friend who’s a doctor in Scotland, and I basically called him and said, “Just tell me stories.” I wanted to have information and possible scenarios in my head, things that doctors and nurses would have gone through. We talk all the time anyway, but I just wanted to have that added weight to it.

And we do have a medical adviser with us on the set all day, every day. Even for scenes that aren’t medically heavy, he’s there to make us look like we know what we’re doing and to help us pronounce things right.