Tag: television

When his TV series “Transplant” debuts on American television on Sept. 1, Joseph Kay will be watching the reaction — but he won’t be doing so nervously, he says.

“Lots of times, you’re accustomed to working on something really hard for a long time and not getting seen by as many people as you’d like. Now it’s got a platform on a pretty big network for a pretty big audience and they’re making a big push, so I’m excited for people to see it. 

“I’m very curious to hear what they’re going to say.”

The “it” is Canadian medical drama “Transplant,” which debuted on Canada’s CTV in February with more than 1.3 million viewers and ended its season in May with nearly 1.7 million, an impressive number for a made-in-Canada show. On Sept. 1 at 10 p.m., it will premiere on NBC, which knows a thing or two about medical dramas as home of the venerable “ER” and more current hits like “New Amsterdam.”

Not just that, “Transplant” will air right after top-rated reality series “America’s Got Talent,” an extra vote of confidence from NBC.

Kay, who has written for Canadian dramas like “This Is Wonderland” and “This Life,” and co-created the comedy “Living in Your Car,” has had some time since the auspicious Canadian debut of “Transplant” — which stars Hamza Haq as a Syrian refugee restarting his medical career at a Toronto hospital — to consider why the show resonates with viewers.

He puts it down to a few things: the “democratization of content” or the idea that, with the rise of streaming services and the availability of non-English-language shows on those services, people are becoming more interested in other people’s experiences; the universality of the idea of starting over, like Haq’s character Bashir; and the fact it’s a hospital show, with its inherent possibilities for life-and-death storylines.

“Also the actor who plays the main character is pretty versatile,” adds Kay. “He’s really talented and he has an amazing vulnerability to him that sort of draws people in . . . he’s a star, like he’s gonna be a Marvel superhero” someday.

(As an aside, Kay knows something about the idea of starting over. He was a corporate lawyer for two years when he realized that wasn’t what he wanted to do with his life. So he got a grant to make a short film, which gained him acceptance into the Canadian Film Centre’s Bell Media Prime Time TV writing program, and then he met playwright George F. Walker through a friend of a friend and got a job on Walker’s CBC legal drama “This Is Wonderland.”)

When Kay first started to conceptualize “Transplant” in late 2016 and early 2017, Donald Trump had just been elected U.S. president and immigration had became a political issue in the U.S. Plus, Syrian refugees were in the news in Canada, which had taken in thousands of Syrians fleeing war in their home country.

Kay, who says he worshipped “ER,” had always wanted to write a medical drama. He had begun researching the lives of medical residents when he stumbled on just how difficult it is for foreign-trained doctors to get residency spots in Canadian hospitals. “And so, at that point, I realized it was a novel way to frame a medical drama.”

He talked to as many actual refugees as he could, to “earn the right” to tell the story, a right he says he continues to try to earn by having lots of newcomers to Canada as consultants on “Transplant.”

Interestingly, “Transplant” is having its U.S. debut just as Trump seeks re-election and immigration continues to be a topic of debate, particularly with travel restricted by the COVID-19 epidemic.

When U.S. viewers watch “Transplant,” they’ll be seeing not just an immigrant as the lead character but one who is a practising Muslim.

Kay recalls, when pitching the series to CTV, discussing the fact that Bashir was the type of character who hadn’t been the focus of a network show before “and we’re not gonna pretend he’s not Muslim. We’re gonna lean into it and that’s what makes the show. That’s what gives it its fullness and its honesty, and we’re not going to be afraid of any of that stuff.”

There’s another element to “Transplant,” one that has also been mentioned in connection with Canadian hit “Schitt’s Creek,” the idea of a kinder style of TV show.

“It makes total sense,” says Kay when I suggest it. “I think we all miss ‘The West Wing,’ where it was about smart, hopeful people who wanted to make the world a better place . . . And then we had this rich history of anti-heroes, like the “Breaking Bads,” the Don Drapers and the Tony Sopranos, and on and on and on. I love all those shows, but they’re kind of glorifications of darkness.”

Bashir was pitched as a character who had faced incredible obstacles but still had hope. “He kind of gets up every day thinking, ‘You can start again today’ and that everybody can start again, and that hope sort of infuses people to care about each other . . . It’s not that there isn’t any conflict. There’s conflict, and sometimes people are selfish and shitty and all the things that we all are, but the show is infused with an optimism and a hopefulness,” Kay says.

Hope is alive in another sense for “Transplant”: the hope that the show will return to production in Montreal in the fall. Season 2 has already been green-lit by CTV and episodes are being written. It’s just a question of when shooting can safely begin given the pandemic.

“Plans are being drawn up and we just have more social distancing parameters than the average workplace, but I have every confidence it will happen,” Kay says.

In the meantime, if you have yet to see “Transplant,” or you’d just like to watch it again, CTV will re-air the first season in sync with NBC, beginning Sept. 1 at 10 p.m. It’s also available on demand and on Crave.