Noah Wyle

One of the decisions we made early on was to not employ any soundtrack in the show.

And by lifting the music out, we've sort of removed the artifice that says you're watching a TV show and we need you to feel sad here because we're playing strings, or exciting here because we're using percussion.

We're letting the sort of symphony of the sound of the procedures in the room

be our cadence, and a lot of that is the technical jargon that the doctors are employing.

It becomes the soundtrack and the scene, and the intensity with which they're delivering those lines becomes the emotional equivalent of a score.

And it's really less important the audience understands and more important that the audience sees that the doctors know what they're talking about.

It's competency porn.

The rehearsals are extensive, especially for the medical scenes.

We often rehearse those 24 hours in advance of shooting them so we can come in with it pretty well in our muscles already and then figure out how we want to photograph it on the day we shoot.

In terms of how the dialogue is overlapped, that's intentional because that's real.

You know, you've got four or five people in the room, all are working simultaneously trying to do their own thing and record their own thing in the medical record.

So a lot of times the sound is really cacophonous.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was, you know, watching the news, but I was also getting a lot of mail that was coming from first responders.

And some of it was, you know, hey, Carter, we could use you out here.

Carter was the character you played on ER, right?

Outside of the birth of my kids, this is probably the best thing I ever did with my life because we inspired a generation of practitioners to go into the work that is saving lives right now.

And then I went on to say that I think something's happening here.

And if you ever want to make a show about what's happening here, even though...