Emergency Room returns for second season
Popular show on life at Vancouver General Hospital returns for second season
FRANCOIS MARCHAND You learn some pretty important lessons when you work on the television show Emergency Room: Life and Death at VGH, which takes the viewer into the heart-pounding and bloody drama that unfolds daily at Vancouver General Hospital.
“Look both ways before you cross the street” was the main take-away from working on the show’s first season, series producer David Moses says.
“It’s so basic, but especially in Vancouver there’s this thing we found out about that is called the Vancouver Special that they talk about in emergency rooms: Dark night, raining, and a pedestrian gets hit — it’s called a ped-struck.” That was Season 1.
“Season 2 was: Take care of your feet,” Moses adds. “When you watch all of the episodes, you’re going, ‘Oh my gosh, you really have to take care of your body.’ It’s going to have its revenge on you in ways you can’t imagine.
“There’s a couple of scenes with feet that make you go, ‘Right, I didn’t take enough time down there, taking care of them.’”
Season 2 of Emergency Room once again takes the viewer deep in the bowels of the VGH ER, where often complex, life-threatening and quite graphic interventions take place — from simple cuts and bruises to extensive heart procedures.
The show attracted a whopping 1.2 million TV and online viewers in its first season, a startling success for B.C. public broadcaster Knowledge Network and the show’s production company, Lark Productions. The series also earned two Leo Awards in 2015 — for best television show and best documentary — and two Canadian Screen Awards nominations in 2016.
“Oftentimes you have to ask people to watch your shows,” Moses says. “This is the first show where, unsolicited, people came up to me and told me they had seen it and loved it. That was really gratifying.
“I got calls from friends and neighbours across the country who watched it online or watched it on satellite (television). I have a cousin who works on the east coast in a hospital who said the hospital staff were all watching the show and that there are some schools who were using the episodes as teaching aids for nursing students to let them know what goes on in the emergency room.”
Moses’ pedigree includes working as a writer on Robson Arms, for which he earned a Gemini Awards nomination, as well as CBC series Heartland. He has recently been working on reality-driven television, including Gastown Gamble, The Real Housewives of Vancouver and Tricked.
The second season of Emergency Room was shot between June and September of 2015. Moses admits the process of shooting at VGH was not without risk, and some crew members were affected by various ailments, including shingles and gastro diseases.
“In every season there is something that happens where one of the crew ends up in the ER themselves,” he says.
The response from the medical staff at the hospital has been overwhelmingly positive, Moses says.
“When we were preparing for Season 2, we went back in to do some pre-interviews just to suss how people were feeling or if there was something we could do better. We interviewed the trauma doctors — they’re an entity all to themselves and they play an important part in the emergency room, but they’re not the emergency room physicians. So every department we contacted said, ‘ We love the series but we think you should do more about us.’” Moses laughs. “It’s a great response,” he adds. “It’s interesting that at the beginning of a season, as a viewer I feel like it’s all some kind of controlled chaos. But by the end of it, for us at any rate, it’s not chaos any more. It’s still a crazy beehive, but now you can separate the people and their duties and why each of the people who are in that room are necessary. Everybody is there for a real specific reason. At the end of the season you really feel like you have a better understanding (of how the ER works).”
If Season 1 was one of shock at having an unprecedented level of access to the hospital’s emergency room, seeing things never seen and going places that hadn’t been visited before, Season 2 is about expanding on the relationships built with the medical staff at VGH and discovering new areas of the hospital.
“There’s an amazing digital scan that we have for one patient that’s coming up that is just unreal,” Moses says. “It takes you through the different layers of the patient’s body — I’m not talking about an Xray or a CT scan — I’m talking about a complete digital representation of the patient’s body.”
Granted, some moments are not for the squeamish or the faint of heart. And if you think what you get to see is pretty hardcore, ask the people who assemble the show what they’ve been through.
“In Season 2, we were really aware that the story editors and the editors actually go through all of the footage — the raw footage — which has even more graphic images than what we share on the show,” Moses says. “An editor watches a particular scene dozens of time in order to put it together.
“That’s an amazing responsibility for them. Fortunately, everybody’s been able to take it. But it’s hard work for sure.”
In every season there is something that happens where one of the crew ends up in the ER themselves. DAVID MOSES, series producer