In the span of a couple of weeks, NBC medical drama New Amsterdam, starring Ryan Eggold, found itself eerily blending fiction and reality amid a global pandemic. Set and shot in New York, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S., the series, created by David Schulner, had shot an upcoming episode about a deadly flu pandemic in NYC. Soon after that, a recurring guest star, Daniel Dae Kim tested positive for the coronavirus, and a writer and three New Amsterdam crew members got sick.
NBC has decided to pull the flu pandemic episode, originally titled “Pandemic” and later renamed “Our Doors Are Always Open”, which had been initially slated as the show’s next original on April 7. Instead, New Amsterdam, which will be shifting from its Tuesday 10 PM slot to the 9 PM hour vacated by This Is Us starting next week, will run repeats the next two weeks, with the last remaining produced new episode before the mass TV production shutdown airing as a season finale on April 14. (Ellen’s Game Of Games, which was supposed to air repeats at 8 PM and originals at 9 PM, will now run originals at 8 PM.) The flu pandemic episode of New Amsterdam, which has been renewed for the next three seasons, will air at a future date.\
New Amsterdam creator, executive producer and showrunner Schulner supports the decision. “The world needs a lot less fiction right now, and a lot more facts,” he says in an emotional essay written for Deadline. In it, he talks about the origin of the pandemic episode, written in 2019, and describes some of the scenes in it that do not look like fiction at all.
“We showed what happens when our hospital has to erect tents in the parking lot because every bed is taken,” Schulner says of the medical drama, which was inspired by New York’s Bellevue public hospital and films at Bellevue.
Today, we woke up to images of the military erecting tents to serve as makeshift morgues outside Bellevue hospital as New York is bracing for potential surge in coronavirus victims.
“Sometimes, what the mirror reflects back is too horrifying to look at,” Schulner writes.
As the only medical drama filming in New York, New Amsterdam sprung into action when, overwhelmed by exponentially growing new infections, New York was on the brink of running out of medical supplies. A half a truck load of PPE, masks, gloves, gowns and face masks were delivered to the New York State Department of Health Friday morning. New York State now accounts for more than half of the coronavirus cases in the U.S., the majority of them in NYC.
(Excerpt) Read more in: Deadline