Childrens Hospital

Synopsis

Childrens Hospital centers on the staff of the titular hospital, a children's hospital named after Dr. Arthur Childrens. The hospital sporadically (and usually without reason) is mentioned as being located within Brazil despite making virtually no effort to conceal that the series is shot in Los Angeles, California, except for the fifth season, which was set at an American military base in Japan. Its webisodes are about 10–12 minutes long, each narrated by mainly Dr. Cat Black (Lake Bell) in Season 1, and by Dr. Valerie Flame (Malin Åkerman) in Season 2.

Broadcast

Though Comedy Central made a competing offer, the show was picked up by Adult Swim after Corddry decided the comedy style was not suited for the half-hour format Comedy Central wanted. Adult Swim offered half-hour or fifteen-minute time slots, and Corddry chose the latter. The original season one webisodes began airing on Adult Swim on July 11, 2010, in groups of two with a new faux-commercial in between the groupings of two webisodes. The channel then debuted the newly produced season two episodes which began airing on August 22, 2010.

On September 1, 2010, Childrens Hospital began airing on the Canadian television channel G4. In Winter 2013, the show was picked up by Much. In Australia Childrens Hospital premiered on cable on Comedy Channel on January 26, 2011, and on ABC's free-to-air channel ABC2 during May–June 2013. The series began airing repeats on American cable channel TBS beginning October 20, 2014.

Cast and characters

The series revolves around the medical staff of Childrens Hospital, featuring an ensemble cast.

These actors receive top billing in the credits:

Dr. Blake Downs (Rob Corddry) – doctor who does his job while wearing clown make-up and surgical scrubs painted red to appear bloody. He believes in "the healing power of laughter" instead of medicine. The character's outlook on medicine seems to parody Robin Williams's character in the film Patch Adams. His frightening clown makeup, very similar to the style of serial killer John Wayne Gacy's "Pogo the Clown", often scares the child patients. His status as a clown is frequently likened to a race, and one episode implies that his original name was "Mr. Bojiggles". The character is brutally killed at the end of season 4, but revived at the beginning of season 5; the hospital has a series of cloned clown doctors who are taught Blake Downs's history, so that when one dies, another is activated.

Dr. Catholomule "Cat" Black (Lake Bell) – ex-girlfriend of Glenn Richie, who has a thing for her roommate Lola Spratt. Things became awkward between the women after Cat accidentally sneezed on Lola when making a sexual advance on her. She narrated the show during season 1, usually wandering through the hospital, thinking faux-deep thoughts like the characters on Scrubs and Grey's Anatomy. Cat begins dating Little Nicky (Nick Kroll), a six-year-old boy with advanced aging disease; and she dies giving birth to his child, who also has advanced aging disease. In "The Sultan's Finger," however, it is revealed she didn't die, but somehow lost all her previous medical knowledge. She then regains it and rejoins the main cast beginning with season 3. She briefly takes up nudism at home in "The Black Doctor". In spite of her "thing" with Lola, she rejects Chief's advances in "Ladies' Night". In one episode she reveals that she grew up in Senegal.

Dr. Glenn Richie (Ken Marino) – a Jewish doctor and ex-boyfriend of Cat Black. He frequently wears a yarmulke but because of his parents' divorce he never had his bar mitzvah until the episode "Party Down". Dr. Richie is the "playboy" of the hospital, having made out with most of the characters except Sy and Blake. Dr. Richie first appeared in The Ten, which also starred Corddry and was directed by producer David Wain. Sal Viscuso's first PA announcement on the show is a reference to this.

Recurring

Sal Viscuso (voiced by Michael Cera) – The hospital staffer who speaks over the intercom. He usually speaks only a few lines per credited episode, typically a non sequitur to the plot. The character name—and in fact the bit itself—is a homage to the actor Sal Viscuso, who voiced the unseen P.A. announcer in the TV series M*A*S*H. Cera eventually appears in the episode "Attention Staff" as a young boy whose aging process has stopped (credited as "A Friend"). In this same episode, Michael Andrew Stock briefly appears as Viscuso, though still voiced by Cera.

Nurse Beth (Beth Dover) – (season 2; season 4–7); a nurse at the hospital, a wide-eyed ingénue who is the subject of viewer fan fiction.

Officer Chance Briggs (Nick Offerman) – Owen Maestro's former partner, a mustachioed New York city cop.

Little Nicky (Nick Kroll) – (seasons 1–2), a young boy with a rare rapid aging disease, and later the father of Dr. Black's child (also played by Kroll), who inherits Nicky's disease. Little Nicky takes on the stereotypes of an old man once his disease reaches advanced stages. The disease takes his life in season two.

Dr. Jason Mantzoukas (Nate Corddry) and Dr. Ed Helms (Ed Helms) – (season 1), two doctors who usually appear together and make sexual remarks about The Chief.

Dr. Max Von Sydow (John Ross Bowie) – (seasons 1–3), a doctor who tries to cure The Chief's condition.

Dr. Nate Schacter (Seth Morris) – (season 1), another clown doctor with whom Dr. Blake Downs develops a rivalry.

Ben Hayflick (Kurtwood Smith) – (season 2), head of the National Division of Health who is trying to suppress Dr. Richie's cancer cure to protect its profits; based on the Cigarette Man from the X-Files.

Derrick Childrens (Jon Hamm) – (seasons 2–3, 5, 7), the son of the founder of Childrens Hospital and secret identity of Valerie Flame. Hamm also plays young Arthur Childrens in flashbacks.

"Behind the scenes"

The series occasionally presents fictional "behind-the-scenes" episodes, supposedly chronicling the production of the series. These episodes portray Childrens Hospital as a long-running medical drama and typically feature interviews with the self-absorbed, eccentric cast members (also fictional characters). The first such episodes were presented as clips from a fictional 60 Minutes-style newsmagazine entitled Newsreaders, which was later spun off into its own Adult Swim series. These fictional cast members have stories of their own:

Cutter Spindell as Blake Downs. When Spindell is introduced, he is the only cast member who enjoys working on the show, and spearheads a campaign to save it from cancelation. Spindell is killed in an accident on set at the end of season 4, and is replaced by his identical twin brother Rory Spindell, a film and stage actor who is loathed by the other performers on the show.

Dixie Peters, legal name Cynthia Quelson, as Cat Black. Peters is a pretentious actress who is fond of unusual makeup and who has an enormous photograph of herself in her dressing room. She marries series director David Wain, but cheats on him with fellow cast member Just Falcon, and the couple eventually divorces. She and cast member Lynn Williams have a long-standing rivalry over their roles in the show and their complicated relationships with director David Wain.

Just Falcon as Glenn Richie. Falcon is a deeply eccentric man with little ability to relate to other people. He has a long and tumultuous relationship with David Wain, although Falcon is completely unaware of the strife and considers Wain a close friend. Falcon wears a long beard, which is covered up to film the show. Falcon is largely a parody of Joaquin Phoenix in I'm Still Here.

Rob Huebel (sometimes spelled Heubel) as Owen Maestro. The pronunciation and spelling of Huebel's name changes from episode to episode. Huebel (the character) is a flamboyant gay man whose tastes in fashion and facial hair run towards the 1970s. He is rarely seen without a drink in his hand, and often throws glitter into the air after making a big announcement.

Lady Jane Bentick-Smith as Chief. Bentick-Smith is an affable English woman, and apparently a member of the British aristocracy. She has a long history of theater work, and much of her dialogue consists of nonsensical Britishisms.

Production

During the first three seasons, portions of the show were filmed in North Hollywood Medical Center, the same former hospital used for filming Scrubs and several other movies and television programs, until its demolition in 2011. As a parody of the live episode "Ambush" of ER, the season two finale (aired November 7, 2010) was promoted as a live broadcast.

Reception

Ratings

Despite the low ratings compared to other cable television series, Childrens Hospital still has received its highest ratings to date on its midnight (Eastern Time) slot. On Friday, September 3, 2010, it pulled in 525,000 viewers while the next Sunday yielded 551,000 (in the 18–34 demographic).

Related projects

The mock television advertisements presented with the Adult Swim broadcasts of Childrens Hospital season one tied into future Adult Swim programs. A commercial for a crime procedural parody led to the show NTSF:SD:SUV:: (National Terrorism Strike Force: San Diego: Sport Utility Vehicle), which ran from 2011 to 2013. Similarly, a commercial featuring Chris Elliott promoting a fictional health drink called "Nutricai" turned out to be a tie-in with an episode of Eagleheart, one episode of which featured Elliott's character joining a multi-level marketing business selling the product.

Some episodes of Childrens Hospital featured a fictional TV show called Newsreaders, a parody of the CBS show 60 Minutes; this led to Newsreaders being picked up as its own show on Adult Swim, premiering in January 2013. Former Daily Show co-executive producer Jim Margolis served as showrunner, developing the series with Childrens Hospital creators Wain, Corddry, and Jonathan Stern.

In 2011, Corddry stated that the cast and creative team of Childrens Hospital were working on doing a movie together, separate from Childrens Hospital, with a different story and characters.

In 2020, Netflix premiered Medical Police, a ten-episode spinoff of Childrens Hospital. The show stars Hayes and Huebel as Lola and Owen, who are recruited into a globe-spanning mission to uncover a conspiracy behind a global pandemic and find a cure. Åkerman, Bell, Cera, Corddry, Marino, and Winkler also reprised their Childrens Hospital characters as guest performers.