September 14, 2014 by The Sumter Item

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THE SUMTER ITEM

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2014

New FOX Series is Surprisingly Uplifting By Candace Havens FYI Television

Sunday, September 14, 2014

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Emma (Ciara Bravo) plays one of the patients on the new series “Red Band Society,” premiering Wednesday at 9 p.m. on FOX.

At first glance, a show about kids fighting terrible diseases in a children’s hospital might sound depressing, but “Red Band Society,” premiering Wednesday at 9 p.m. on FOX, is so much more than that. It does have drama, but there is also a great deal of humor. It is a comingof-age series about unlikely friends who band together to help each other through the bad and the good. The way into the story is through 12-year-old Charlie (Griffin Gluck), a coma patient who knows everything that is going on around him. Though he can only speak to his friends when they are under anesthesia or asleep, he’s able to get his messages across. The friends include newcomer Jordi (Nolan Sotillo), Leo (Charlie Rowe), Dash (Brian “Astro” Bradley), Emma (Ciara Bravo) and another newcomer, Kara (Zoe Levin). These kids may be seriously ill, but they refuse to be defined by that. Creator Margaret Nagle, who comes from a family of doctors, has intimate knowledge of what happens in a pediatric facility like the one on the show. “About 85 percent of the kids that go to the hospital with any one of these diseases in this situation recover,” she says. “So, it’s really about the time you spend in the hospital and how it changes you and what you learn. What if you were able to learn what life is actually about when you’re young enough to do something about it? “I had a brother who was in a coma, and I grew up in pediatric

hospitals, and so I found them to be the most uplifting, the most hilarious – the black humor, the fun, the getting to know the kids that you would never know in any other situation – and these walls fall down. So yes, there are serious things that these kids are going to have to face, but it is not a show that has a body count, unlike other shows that are on TV. That’s not where the show lives.” While the kids can get up to some pretty crazy antics, they are well cared for by the staff at the hospital. It’s not an easy job taking care of patients who aren’t old enough to understand the complexities of what’s happening to them. Nurse Jackson (Oscar winner Octavia Spencer), who believes in tough love but is all heart, runs the pediatric ward. Dr. Jack McAndrew (Dave Annable) is one of the country’s top pediatric surgeons and does his best to keep his patients healthy and happy. Kenji (Wilson Cruz) may be one of the coolest orderlies on the planet, while Nurse Brittany Dobler (Rebecca Rittenhouse) is new to the ward and is often the comic relief. “The doctors and the nurses and the orderlies in pediatrics, they’re different from the rest of the hospital and other areas of medicine,” Nagle says. “This is something they are driven to do. They want to be there in this job. Sometimes they’re working out something in their own life, childhood, someone they couldn’t save, someone that they loved, that they lived with. Obviously, I’m working out some issues here. But they bring that into

their work. And so the backstories on these adult characters are incredibly rich and textured and layered. Kids in hospitals, often their parents can’t be there every day. They have jobs. They have work. They get transferred. There are other kids. So, the adults are standing in as parents as well. And when you talk to people in children’s hospitals, this is part of their job. So, they’ve all got backstories and relationships with each other as well that lead them there.” “The thing that Margaret does so beautifully,” adds Spencer, “is that you think it’s going to be about sick kids in the hospital, which is a downer. But I was surprised by how uplifting it was. And then to realize that kids do spend that much time in a hospital and go through some of the normalcies of wanting to go to dances and then maybe having a dance or all of the ups and downs of adolescence in that. All of us, actually, have been to some of the children’s hospitals around the country. “We were at one hospital and there was a baby with leukemia, and it was just sort of odd but beautiful that everybody there took turns answering the phone and holding the baby. I thought somebody brought their baby to work for the day, or didn’t have childcare. And they were like, ‘Oh, no. This is a patient. His parents can’t be here because they work, so we take turns. He needs stimulation. He needs to be out.’ It just made me realize how truthful the script is to real life, and I think that’s why it works.”

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