Hosps get in on the TV act
NBC med drama a boo$ter shot to city
The city is getting an infusion of cash in this medical drama.
The new NBC series “New Amsterdam,” which depicts a fictionalized version of Bellevue Hospital, is being filmed at the actual hospital and pouring money into the city’s public hospital system.
NYC Health + Hospitals, the financially challenged corporation that runs the city’s public hospitals, has received $665,000 so far to allow the filming at Bellevue and three of its other medical centers.
The TV series is based on the nonfiction book “Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital” by Dr. Eric Manheimer, a former Bellevue medical director.
It stars Ryan Eggold as the maverick medical director Max Goodwin, who takes charge at New Amsterdam Hospital.
Viewers might recognize Bellevue’s distinctive lobby, which incorporates the brick facade of a 1940 administration building within a new glass atrium.
In the series pilot, Goodwin, on a balcony overlooking the lobby, receives a frantic phone call informing him that a young patient who arrived at the hospital from Liberia may have Ebola.
Bellevue actually treated the city’s first Ebola patient in 2014, a doctor who got sick in Africa while caring for patients there.
Scenes were also shot outside the First Avenue hospital in its “comfort garden.”
Universal Television, which is producing the show, is paying $10,000 a day to film at Bellevue and agreed to fork over up to $200 an hour for an unspecified consultant to provide technical medical advice, according the contract between the production company and Health + Hospitals, a copy of which was obtained by The Post.
Universal Television also paid $66,000 to film in March at Metropolitan Hospital in Manhattan, where shooting took place in an unused intensive care unit.
Film shoots at Brooklyn’s Woodhull Hospital in March brought in another $45,000.
Much of the filming is taking place at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, where Universal Television paid an initial fee of $187,500 to use an empty floor, vacant space on two other floors and the hospital’s sky bridge.
“Some of the space built for inpatient beds long ago is still there, but it’s unoccupied and unstaffed,” said Robert de Luna, a spokesman for Health + Hospitals. “That presents a great opportunity for a production company and a welcome source of revenue for our health system.”
He said the health system was still determining how to spend the extra money.
NBC announced this month that it ordered nine more episodes of the series and filming is ongoing.