St. Denis Medical is back — and better than ever — in season 2 as the hospital undergoes some surprising shakeups.
In Us Weekly‘s exclusive first look at the trailer, Joyce (Wendi McLendon-Covey) welcomes the camera crew back into St. Denis Regional Medical Center, saying, “A lot has happened since you were gone.”
The changes are responsible for some of the show’s wildest antics yet.
“I decided to bring in a professional therapy horse, but there has been an unanticipated downside,” Joyce explains before the horse poops. Alex (Allison Tolman) then tells Matt (Mekki Leeper) there’s “another code brown” for him to clean up.
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Elsewhere in the clip, Bruce (Josh Lawson) is seen play-fighting with Matt.
“You are my captive,” he tells Matt, who turns the tables on the surgeon, saying, “I guess I will have to lick my way out.”
Ron (David Alan Grier) returns in a fun tropical shirt before later offering Alex some of his trademark insight. “Talking smack about each other is like 90 percent of what we do here,” he says.
The sneak peek ends with Joyce teaching her employees some self-defense tactics.
“I want to teach you all how to defend yourselves. Put your keys in between your knuckles and boom, keys to the groin,” she explains. “If your attacker is a female, a key fob is no vacation either.”
St. Denis Medical, which premiered in 2024, follows overworked doctors and nurses trying their best to care for patients at an underfunded Oregon hospital. Season 2 is expected to feature a plethora of guest stars including Ariana Madix, Kristen Schaal, Frankie Quiñones, Lauren Lapkus, Jeremiah Brown and more.
“It’s so fun to be in a mockumentary. I cherish the moments where I get to look into the camera and have that relationship,” Kahyun Kim exclusively told Us Weekly in November 2024. “Especially with Serena, it’s really fun because she’s so honest and you can really tell how she feels from her face. I love having that connection with the audience in that way.”
Leeper, 30, meanwhile, told Us his time on the St. Denis Medical set was “a blast,” adding, “I grew up wanting to be on a show like The Office or Parks and Recreation. Then I think there were some years where they weren’t making as many of those types of shows. It took somebody like Quinta Brunson [from Abbott Elementary] to blow open the doors again for shows like this to be popular.”
The costars revealed that the biggest challenge of making St. Denis Medical is remembering to look at the camera.
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“It took a hot second to get used to. Personally — for me — once I got used to it, I took any moment I could to look into the camera. I love it,” Kim, 30, said. “It’s so fun to explore that space that I never got to because we’re so used to hearing, ‘Don’t look into the camera.’ So it’s a blast for me.”
Leeper found that filming a mockumentary offered “an extra dimension” for the actors to explore with their characters.
“You have this whole bonus space that is never available and you can put truly whatever you want in it. It’s different for everybody because Wendi looks at the camera differently than David does,” he explained. “Ron and Serena, those are characters that are always exhausted [by] the person that’s in front of them. Joyce is trying to cover to make the hospital seem nice. Matt is always caught doing something embarrassing. So having that as a tool is amazing. Just getting to directly do a joke to the camera is just so fun and satisfying.”
St. Denis Medical returns to NBC Monday, November 3, at 8 p.m. ET with back-to-back episodes before streaming the next day on Peacock.
