It may be 16 years since the last episode of TV drama Party of Five aired, but series star Scott Wolf, who also co-helms current hospital show The Night Shift, has barely aged a day. The youthful actor plays Dr. Scott Clemmens (“the same first name as me, so much easier,” Wolf quips) on The Night Shift, and much like other hospital dramas, his character has his fair share of occupational difficulties and personal strife to deal with.
The Night Shift differs from your standard medical show because of its comedic tendencies – something Wolf says happens organically with the cast and the writing team. Any given story, no matter how intense or serious, always has a counterbalance of levity, and as a viewer, you don’t feel stuck in the hospital hallways.
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Take the Season 3 finale, for example. Clemmens and his various medical team members are in precarious situations: He and Jordan (Jill Flint) are trapped in an increasingly serious wildfire while TC (Eoin Macken) and Syd (Jennifer Beals) face numerous life-threatening obstacles at the Turkey-Syria border, with Syd’s typhus getting worse. Not to mention the fact that the future of their hospital is in question.
Global News spoke to Wolf about the Season 3 finale (airing Mon., Sept. 12 at 9 p.m. on Global TV), playing a doctor on TV and the secret to his youthfulness.
Scott Wolf: [Laughs] It’s genetics. Both my parents look super young, and they always have. I suppose part of it is clean livin’, but I’m convinced it’s going to catch up with me. I’m going to wake up one day and it’s all going to come rushing in. I am a skin-care line waiting to happen. My wife reminds me that I don’t look 30 anymore. [Laughs]
Have you learned a lot, medically, over the three seasons of The Night Shift?
This is actually the third show where I’ve played a doctor, which is kind of wild. For a short-lived ABC show The Nine, I played a surgeon. So for that role, I thought it would be great to talk to an actual surgeon. A producer on the show did me one better and arranged for me to shadow a real surgeon for the day. I did everything from sitting around with him to talking to patients’ parents to watching him do two open-heart surgeries. Most importantly, I scrubbed in and stood over the field while he did them. It was remarkable and completely invaluable … a lot of actor food for me to chew on.
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One thing that stands out about The Night Shift is the tone. While you deal with heavy issues in some scenes, there’s always this feeling of levity with this cast.
One hundred per cent, yes. There’s a ton of levity and a huge amount of humour between all of us as producers, actors and writers as a group. The design of it is … some of it is drawn from M.A.S.H., the gallows and relationship humour. That’s the truth of the environment. So many of them you have to use humour to get through it. It’s so crazy and hectic, people’s lives are hanging in the balance. It feels very honest that there’s humour in the show, and it sets it apart from other medical dramas. It moves between sometimes really broad funny giggly comedy, and really emotional life-and-death stories. The first season was the show trying to find that balance, and by now it’s essentially become the tone of the show.
[Laughs] I get it! The writers and producers have come up with a pretty intense and harrowing situation for a lot of our lead characters to be in. Jordan and Scott are hunkered down under a fire blanket waiting for this raging inferno to blaze over them, and I can tell you that the life-and-death of it all, including TC and Syd … their lives hang in the balance.
For anyone who hasn’t seen it, I invite them to watch. I’d put up the intensity and emotion of The Night Shift against any other show on TV right now. And for our fans, I would say fasten your seat belts, because we don’t make it easy on you at the end of Season 3.
The Season 3 finale of ‘The Night Shift’ airs on Global TV at on Monday, Sept. 12 at 9 p.m.