Warning: spoilers are ahead for the Season 1 finale of NBC's St. Denis Medical, called "This Place is Our Everything" and available streaming next day with a Peacock subscription.
St. Denis Medical has officially wrapped on NBC in the spring 2025 TV schedule, ending with a guarantee that the motley crew of doctors and nurses will be back for Season 2. The early renewal was a major accomplishment for the cast, but their characters weren't exactly resting on their laurels in "This Place is Our Everything." Chaos took over the Emergency Department when a storm blew in, with Alex attempting to be there for her husband during his vasectomy while also helping in the swamped ED. Allison Tolman spoke with CinemaBlend to shed some light.
Since this is St. Denis Medical and not the much more dramatic Chicago Med elsewhere on NBC, the chaos eventually slowed down to a pretty calm ending. First, though, Alex got a a wakeup call from Joyce. She told Alex:
We're the same. I mean, not exactly the same... but when it comes to what we sacrifice for this hospital, we're the same. Some people just clock in, clock out, go home. Not us. Oh no, this place is our everything. Everything. I mean, it's your day off, and you're here, Alex. It's okay to own it.
Considering that Alex's arc over the course of the first season has been trying to balance her work as supervising nurse with her home life as wife and mother, hearing Joyce compare them was not what she wanted to hear while she was in the ED working and her husband was elsewhere in the hospital having a procedure alone. The couple's clash over possibly having more kids from Josh Lawson's big dance episode was resolved off-screen, and Alex finally realized that she needed to leave work and go support her husband.
Of course, Joyce wasn't the first or only character to comment on Alex's workaholic tendencies. Would that speech have really hit home for the nurse if she'd gotten it from Dr. Ron or Serena or anybody else? Well, I asked Allison Tolman that very question after I watched the hit mockumentary's Season 1 finale, and she responded:
No! The dynamic between Joyce and Alex for the entire first season is what leads us to that conversation, in that Alex is still able to be like, 'Oh my gosh, Joyce? Woof! Oh boy, look at her over there!' So in that moment, to be faced with that direct comparison, I think it's so jarring for her, and she sees that that is really a reality. That's really the road that she's headed down, and with as much love and respect as we can muster for Joyce, Alex is like, 'Whoa, woof. Absolutely not. That is not what I want.’
Joyce's home life – such as it is – has been the source of some great punchlines throughout the show so far, but as Allison Tolman pointed out, Alex "absolutely" does not want that for herself. As much as I've been a fan of any scene between Tolman as Alex and David Alan Grier as Ron in particular, this really did need to happen between Joyce and Alex.
In fact, when I spoke with Allison Tolman earlier this year on the red carpet at SCAD TVfest, I had no idea just how much we'd see of that Alex/Joyce relationship in the back half of Season 1. At the time in February, the Fargo vet told me about the "barrier" between Alex and Joyce that didn't exist between Alex and Ron:
I think that there's a barrier you can't ever quite get past when it's your boss, and Joyce is Alex's boss. So as much as she might like to say, 'God, you're annoying and wrong' to Joyce the way that she says that to Ron, she can't quite get there, which is fun. It's fun to see her be like, 'Oh no, you are also an idiot in your own ways. You are also wrong.' [laughs] And have to kind of bite her tongue about it. Alex is not a person who bites her tongue on a lot of things.
Alex didn't have any kind of outburst in the Season 1 finale, but she did put her foot down about working on her day off. She handed the ED tasks off to Serena and then went to her husband during his vasectomy. He commented that he "absolutely did" expect her to miss the procedure, but in a pretty lighthearted way.
That exchange really reminded me of how Brooklyn Nine-Nine's Kyle Bornheimer has made the most of his time on St. Denis Medical as Tim, despite only appearing in a couple of episodes as Alex's husband before the finale. Ahead of that episode, Allison Tolman commented that she "couldn't have asked for a better partner to hit the ground running with," praising the "warm, lovely, Midwestern way about him" that made him a great fit to play Tim. She went on:
I feel really lucky. I think that it's so important for the audience's understanding of Alex to kind of get to see a little bit of how she is with her family and how she is with her husband. When they told me that they were gonna bring some of her family life to work, I was really excited about that. I didn't know Kyle before. As small as this town is, I didn't know Kyle before we started shooting together, so we just jumped right into our make out scenes in that first episode we had. [laughs] A couple of professionals.
Will we see more of Kyle Bornheimer as Tim in Season 2, or perhaps more of Alex's family? We'll have to wait and find out, but at least we know that NBC is bringing St. Denis Medical back for another batch of episodes. The mockumentary was part of the fall lineup in the 2024-2025 TV schedule, so hopefully fans can count on its return before the end of the year rather than then network holding it for midseason in the 2025-2026 TV span.
St. Denis Medical ending this week also opens up its time slot for a double dose of Night Court to wrap that show's third season. Unlike St. Denis, Night Court has not yet been renewed (or cancelled) for the season.
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