SAVING GRACES
Anyone who does not meet that mark, will be fired.”
And then Max takes the fight to the Nyler family, who make billions every year, like the real-life
Sacler family whose company Purdue Pharma, manufacturers of painkiller brand OxyContin, are currently offering to pay over $10 billion (R144 billion) in damages to settle over 2 000 lawsuits against them.
When production was shut down due to COVID-19 in March this year, New Amsterdam immediately donated all their personal protective gear to New York State’s Department Of Health. “Our crew, the costume team, set decorators and props staff, all went through every storage area, every nook and cranny of every set and put together PPEs, masks, gloves, gowns and face masks,” say David Schulner.
IT’S A SIN!
A church bus crash turns out to have a sinful twist when the hospital winds up treating all the passengers for mysterious pre- existing conditions. But the real sinner is the episode is the United States healthcare insurance system, which has priced most preventive and routine care out of the reach of ordinary citizens – especially the poor, black communities. In episode
17, we will also see Max’s growing frustration with patients having to turn to crowdfunding apps like GoFundMe to pay their hospital bills and expenses because the alternatives are death and bankruptcy. “We’re not reading medical stories. We’re listening to what people are talking about in the country right now and then making that a medical story,” says David.
PANDEMIC
On 12 March 2020, filming halted on this season of New Amsterdam, leaving the season with just 18 episodes. Viewers will see a special message from the cast at the start of episode 18. Ryan Eggold and Daniel Dae Kim (new character Dr Cassian Shin, Daniel played Chin Ho Kelly until 2017 on Hawaii Five- 0, 2010-now) both agree that the episode we’re about to see replaced the original 18th episode, titled Pandemic, because the action that had been scripted in it (written in 2019) was too close to what was then happening in real life. In fact, shortly after shooting the Pandemic episode, Daniel tested positive for the virus along with one of the show’s writers and three crew members.