Obviously, we don’t ever want that to happen, but there’s always the threat of it, and there’s always a situation out there that we all shake our heads at and can’t believe is happening.Īnd so, we didn’t want a show that ignored the world that we’re suddenly in, where events happen, but I also don’t necessarily want to be a show where the audience has to tune in and watch more of what they’re seeing in the news every day. In Season 1, you may remember, a bomb went off at a presidential debate, for example. I don’t know that you could call it a “ripped from the headlines” show, but it’s also not a show that ignores the world around it. The doctors are also dealing with the opioid crisis, so do you want Season 3 to deal with current issues? Are you going to do “ripped from the headlines” stories?
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Every time we put them together in a situation, we just all really loved it. Rox becomes a big part of that, and that was a gift for us that just kept on giving. We start to learn what he needs to ultimately heal himself. We meet Willis’s father, we start to figure out what makes Willis tick, and we start to learn about a very complicated back story that informs that, that ticking of his internal clock. By the time you get to the middle of the season, you start to realize that there’s something more that’s growing between the two of them, but right at that moment that you feel something romantic is happening, is when we start to really dive deeper into Willis’s character. They had a lot of fun on-screen, and their relationship became electrifying for us. What was incredibly gratifying was that those two actors just played really, really well together. Moon Bloodgood (Photo: Monty Brinton/CBS)
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And that, of course, led to, “Well, who’s he going to go out there with?” So, I needed somebody that he was going to be able to interact with on a regular basis, and that became Roxane Valenzuela, played by Moon Bloodgood. So, the idea for Willis was he wants to do that now, he wants to get on an ambulance, and he wants to get out to the scene of the trauma, the accident, the forest fire, or whatever it is. So, when I asked Colonel Rasmussen what his hope would be for emergency medicine in the civilian sector, he said, “My hope would be that they start doing what we do, which is to start sending doctors out on ambulances and helicopters to the scene, and thereby close the Golden Hour.”
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Then we’re always looking for how to make the show evolve.
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They found that sending doctors out into the field, rather than waiting for the patient to come back to the Army hospital or the mobile hospital, that they would increase the survival rates dramatically.Īnd so, in the very beginning, when I came up with the idea of Willis as a character, I wanted Willis to espouse that particular philosophy from the very beginning, which he did all last season. The idea initially came from conversations that I’d had with Colonel Todd Rasmussen, who works for the Department of Defense, and studies almost exclusively the Golden Hour - that period of time between the trauma and the time that the victim gets to robust medical care - with regard to military medicine, which in a lot of ways is also emergency medicine, for obvious reasons. He does that all season, but he’s also in the ER. Is he going to be doing that all season, or is he going to be back in the ER? When we come back, Ethan is out of the ER and in an ambulance, because of his desire to improve on the Golden Hour, which is a real thing.