Doctors Strange: The Complete Oral History of Childrens Hospital

When Hollywood writers went on strike in late 2007, a curious thing happened. The very reason for the strike—studio producers' unwillingness to upgrade the pay scale for digital content—led to one of the major sea changes in recent memory. With the writers' union refusing to write for TV and film, online content was suddenly the only thing writers could write. And one of the projects born of those bizarre circumstances became not just the embodiment of that forward-thinking adaptation, but the harbinger of a new, ensemble-driven comedy landscape that would emerge over the next decade.

Digital series Childrens Hospital, which creator Rob Corddry conceived of during a visit to an actual childrens' hospital, capitalized on the sudden availability of established comic talents like Megan Mullally and Lake Bell. The absurdist parody of hospital dramas—shot in six days on a tiny budget—became an indie hit, and spent the next six seasons on Adult Swim, where it has bent the rules of continuity and character development, skewered just about every storytelling trope imaginable, and developed into a multidimensional meta comedy the likes of which television has never seen.

On the occasion of its finale this Friday, we spoke with the many, many funny people who helped make one Brazilian hospital the happiest—if most bizarre—place on earth.

“If you’ve ever been to any children's hospital, you know it’s the least funny place anywhere.”

Rob Corddry (Creator, Executive Producer, "Dr. Blake Downs): I got cast in a movie called The Ten, one of David Wain’s movies and probably his most under-appreciated and least seen.

Jon Stern (Executive Producer): That’s another way of saying it was his biggest flop ever. I produced it. Ken Marino and David Wain co-wrote it.

Corddry: I was finishing up on The Daily Show and doing a couple of movies. When I got cast in this, I had to go up to some warehouse in Brooklyn. They didn’t have a driver for me and I didn’t know where I was going, so Jon picked me up in the shitbox he was driving at the time.

Stern: That was the Suburu. I picked Rob up on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.

Corddry: That’s when we met, and we had a really fun day.

Stern: The Ten was really the beginning of what became Abominable Pictures. The people on that movie—Rob Corddry, David Wain, Ken Marino and myself—are all still working together to this day.

Corddry: We’re kind of a combination of The State and Upright Citizens Brigade.

Peter Principato (Manager): The State came from more of a scripted background but had a lot of improv experience. UCB starts with improv. Stylistically, the sense of humor and tone were very, very similar.

Stern: The Ten led directly to Wainy Days, a web series that David Wain created about his fictional life as a single man in New York. David asked me to produce it, and Rob Corddry played David Wain 10 years in the future—which seemed plausible at the time even though Rob is younger than David.

Principato: A lot of people were just beginning to shoot things on their own cameras and edit them on their Macs. This was the beginning of being able to make things look good without a lot of money. Jon and David knew from Wainy Days how to make something look expensive without spending a lot of money.

Corddry: I had left The Daily Show to do The Winner on FOX; it had just been cancelled, and the writers’ strike was on. I was not making the money I had been making the last few years.

Principato: It was a bummer that The Winner was cancelled, but he met a lot of people, including Erinn Hayes, through that experience.

Corddry: My oldest daughter pulled her elbow out of socket, and I brought her to Childrens Hospital in L.A. If you’ve ever been to any children's hospital, you know it’s the least funny place anywhere. On the ride home, the idea struck me to do a typical TV medical drama with beautiful people and sex and romance but set it in a really inappropriate place for that.

Principato: Rob came to my office, sat back on the couch, and said, “What if I did a comedy with the sexual chemistry of Grey’s Anatomy, but set in the children's ward of a hospital?”

Corddry: All of the studios had created digital arms, which allowed them to work on something for online that they might be able to use as de facto pilots when the strike ended.

“Our idea with casting was that we were going to shoot the series with funny people that we love.”

Principato: I was representing Jon Stern and David Wain. I told Rob, “You should talk to Jon and David about doing this as a web series that you could direct and write.”

Corddry: The web series was a parody of shows like Grey’s Anatomy. We pretty quickly saw the limitations of that, so we started approaching it as a parody of storytelling tropes if anything.

David Wain (Executive Producer, Director, "Rabbi Jewy McJewjew"): I never watched hospital shows growing up, and I had never seen ER or Grey’s Anatomy. Once we started getting into Childrens Hospital, I just decided to keep it that way to have a clean point of view instead of spoofing things I had seen.

Corddry: Our idea with casting was that we were going to shoot the series with funny people that we love.

Wain: Because it had such a low-stakes, for-kicks kind of vibe, Corddry called up friends who were around the week we were shooting and asked them to come do it.

Principato: Everybody brought people they knew. Rob Corddry knew Erinn Hayes. He was friends with Rob Huebel. David Wain and Jon Stern and I knew Ken Marino.

Erinn Hayes ("Dr. Lola Spratt"): Rob and I were both on The Winner on FOX. The next season I was on Worst Week on CBS, and Rob called and said he wrote this web series and did I want to be on it. The network gave me a Friday off, and I shot all of my scenes that weekend.

Rob Huebel ("Dr. Owen Maestro"): I knew Corddry from Upright Citizens Brigade in New York. We came up together doing sketch and improv with guys like Rob Riggle, Andy Daly, Ed Helms, Paul Scheer, and Brian Huskey.

__Stern: __Huebel is someone who’s now starting to get more dramatic opportunities—as he should. He can be very vulnerable as an actor where that’s called for, but we often write him full of attitude and bluster on Childrens Hospital because it’s fun to watch him do that too.

Wain: Ken Marino and I had worked together fairly consistently since we were 18 years old.

Stern: Ken wanted to play two roles—one with a mustache. Thank God we were able to shut that idea down.

Wain: Lake Bell and Rob Corddry met on a movie [What Happens in Vegas] not long before Childrens Hospital.

Nick Offerman ("Detective Chance Briggs"): My wife [Megan Mullally] was doing Young Frankenstein on Broadway, and I had done a film with Rob Corddry called Taking Chances where he played the evil mayor of a town and I played his sheriff. Not long after that, he sent me scripts for Childrens Hospital.

Corddry: We cast Nick Offerman as Rob Huebel’s former police partner, and he suggested Megan Mullally for the show.

__Offerman: __Megan read the script and said, “Good Lord, this is the funniest thing. Please let me be in it.”

Corddry: Megan Mullally called Laura Innes [who played the physically disabled Dr. Carrie Weaver on ER] to ask her permission to do the Chief character. Megan originally had crutches, but they were so uncomfortable that we switched to a walker.

Stern: We shot the first season in six days. At the end of six days, Megan showed us her arms and they were covered with bruises from the crutches.

Lake Bell (Director, ‘Dr. Cat Black’): We started every episode with the sort of thoughtful, overly dramatic voiceover like you’d hear on a one-hour medical drama.

Hayes: Lake Bell did the voiceovers like Meredith from Grey’s Anatomy. She was more the dreamy character, and my character was more the asshole.

Stern: We pitched it and sold it to the TV division of Warner Bros. for its website.

Corddry: Warner was amazing at letting us do what we wanted to do. Their one note—which they really soft-balled to us—was, “You talk about the Twin Towers burning, but do we really have to see a shot of them burning?” We immediately said, “No, of course not.” It was a terrible idea, and they were very relieved.

Stern: At that time, a web series had to be five minutes per episode tops. If you edited the season together, it was about an hour. We invented binge watching.

Corddry: [Laughs.] That’s a big statement, Stern.

Stern: We said to Warner Bros., “You’re spending all this money promoting this first episode, so you might as well put it all up at once. Otherwise, how many people will remember to watch another episode a week later? If they like it, they’ll watch the next one.” The metrics bore that out. We released all of them on December 8, 2008, and most people watched the episodes all in a row. We got a lot of reaction that the web series was as good as TV.

Corddry: We tried to make it look like TV. It looked better than most of the things that were on the internet at that time. We won a Webby, I think, for the first season.

Stern: Lake Bell and I went and accepted it.

Corddry: I didn’t make the trip back to New York for the awards. I had hosted the Webbys three times times—it paid pretty well—and then I found out in a press release that Seth Meyers was hosting. [Laughs.]

Stern: Best thing that ever happened to the Webbys.

“We’ve closed down many hospitals in Los Angeles.”

Stern: We were planning on doing another web season of Childrens Hospital. We had made the web series for $175,000 and we enjoyed doing it. Why mess with that?

Corddry: Part of the reason we were tentative about doing it for television was that it worked so well in the short format.

Stern: I got a phone call from Nick Weidenfeld at Adult Swim about making Horrible People, a different web series, into a TV series. He said, “I’m passing on Horrible People, but tell me about Childrens Hospital.”

Corddry: Adult Swim seemed like a perfect fit from the start. They offered the creative freedom that we had gotten from Warner Bros.

Stern: When Childrens Hospital got picked up as a series, I was thinking about moving to L.A., and Corddry had already moved to L.A. About a month before the movers came, I had breakfast with Louis C.K., and he said he had this pilot with FX. So I worked on the pilot for Louie and then I moved to L.A.

Corddry: Stern gives one of his best performances in Louie as the man who walks behind Louie in the credits before Louie goes into Ben’s Pizza. Jon Stern is a terrible actor.

Wain: Henry Winkler’s name came up once we made the move to Adult Swim, and we immediately wanted him to be a part of it.

Henry Winkler ("Sy Mittleman"): I got a call from Rob Corddry. I hadn’t seen the web series and didn’t know Rob, but my whole career has been built on instinct. I got a great feeling from him, and really wanted to do the series.

Stern: Corddry was away on a movie, so I went to Henry’s house. We talked for about two hours and only about the last 20 minutes on Childrens Hospital. I’m pretty sure he’d never heard of the show. He may not have even known why I was there.

Jason Mantzoukas (Writer): When Childrens Hospital made the move to Adult Swim, Corddry had different writers come in for pitch meetings for story ideas. In the beginning, there was no writing staff. Corddry hired people like me and Brian Huskey to write individual episodes.

Brian Huskey (Writer, "Chet"): Rob and I were roommates for an unhealthy length of time, and I wasn’t an actor when we first met. Rob gave me the push towards doing comedy, and we started performing at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater.

Offerman: When Childrens Hospital became a series, I had just signed to be on Parks and Recreation, which made me unavailable to be a series regular. I asked NBC, “There’s a show that’s on at midnight on Adult Swim. Could I do five or six episodes a year?” They didn’t want me to compete with Saturday Night Live. [Laughs.] Network TV was still operating at that time on midwestern grandparents’ logic.

Stern: It was two years before the second season aired, but we were shooting again within a year of making the web series.

Wain: Our show by virtue of the budget has to be the lowest priority for a lot of the actors as much as they enjoy doing it. There’s almost never an episode where everyone is there, and we’re always rewriting and reconfiguring episodes to work around people’s schedules.

Bell: During Season 2 of Childrens Hospital, I was on How to Make It in America on HBO. The network wouldn’t let me do both shows, and it was like taking away summer camp. We usually made the show during the summer, and we all took a break from what we were doing and made it a priority. After a lot of kicking and screaming on my part, HBO let me go back and do Season 3.

Corddry: We’ve closed down many hospitals in Los Angeles.

Winkler: We shot one season in the same hospital that Scrubs was shot in, and then it got torn down.

Corddry: Every old, run-down haunted hospital that we’ve shot in gets shut down and demolished after we finish shooting. One year, we even said the cast was in Japan working on an Army base.

Beth Dover ("Nurse Beth"): I was in Osaka, Japan, before that season, and one shot I took with my iPhone actually made it onto the show.

“I wrestled an actual Sumo wrestler.”

Wain: We script as tight as we can and not assume that we’ll come up with better ideas the day we shoot it. We make sure every word is exactly what we want it to be, but we allow for flexibility and improv to a degree. We have to move very fast, so there’s not a lot of time to screw around.

Corddry: It’s really hard to schedule people. They’re all in high demand, so it’s very hard to get everybody together. We don’t write my character into much of the show at the beginning of a season because we know I’ll be there when we’re shooting. If someone gets cast in a movie and has to leave, we can plug in my character.

Wain: A lot of times we’re working out of Google Docs and Dropbox from all over the place. We brainstorm among ourselves with people involved in the show and writers that we like to come up with ideas—like hundreds of ideas, from one-off jokes to full episodes—and start winnowing that down.

Zandy Hartig ("Nurse Dori"): I played Nick Kroll’s mother. He was a six-year-old boy with advanced aging disease. He died from old age but Cat was pregnant with his baby and gave birth to Nick Kroll again.

Wain: For the first few seasons, we did not have a writers’ room. We farmed out a few scripts to writers here and there. For the last few seasons, we’ve had more of a traditional writers’ room. We have preproduction for a month or so, and we shoot for 28 days in a row.

Mantzoukas: I wrote the “Childrens Lawspital” episode. For a long time I tried to convince Corddry to end Childrens Hospital as a hospital shows and relaunch it as a legal procedural—keep all the same actors but make it about lawyers. I was a real zealot for that idea. Corddry said, “I don’t wanna change the whole show, but let’s just do it for one episode.”

Bell: In one episode we were all dressed in these apocalyptic, Mad Max scrubs. David Wain was shooting that episode, and I was directing a different episode at the same time. I ran from my set to the dressing room, put on the apocalypse scrubs, and asked David Wain, “What am I doing?” And he said, “You’re having a sword fight with this woman.” I did the sword fight, and then I went back upstairs to my episode and saw Rob Huebel driving a Rascal.

Huskey: I wrestled an actual Sumo wrestler. I had a back injury and so I asked the wrestler to please not actually slam me to the mat. His English wasn’t great but we choreographed how he was going to move me to the mat so that I wouldn’t be slammed, and he slammed me down hard on the first take.

Winkler: The physical comedy! Honest to God, it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

Wain: We had Ernie Hudson on the show in a story where he had a giant wooden pole impaled through him and his son—the two them back-to-back. It was uncomfortable to be rigged up in that all day and he was a great sport about it. Somebody asked why he did the show, and he said, “I don’t get it, but my agent told me it’s cool.”

“We don’t bog ourselves down in continuity. It’s one of the things that makes the show strange and different.”

Wain: Part of the initial premise was that we were going to do a hospital show with its own absurd logic where we could pick and choose the level of continuity.

Stern: In the first season, Rob wrote all of the episodes but asked me to write one standalone episode—the one with the midget fart, which I think everyone agrees is the worst episode of the series—but it was the first one where the characters step outside of the hospital-drama format and take on the point of view of the fictional creators of the show.

Corddry: We have a behind-the-scenes world on the show where we tell these stories with the fictional actors who play the fictional characters on this Childrens Hospital show that’s been running for 25 or 30 years in different incarnations.

Stern: Corddry plays Dr. Blake Downs on the show. The actor who plays Dr. Blake Downs—the behind-the-scenes actor—is Cutter Spindell. And a few seasons into the show, Cutter Spindell dies while making Childrens Hospital, and the character is now played by his brother, Rory Spindell.

Corddry: The behind-the-scenes world follows more of a strict mythology than Childrens Hospital, where characters come back to life or disappear from one episode to the next. We don’t bog ourselves down in continuity. It’s one of the things that makes the show strange and different.

Wain: When I appear as “David Wain,” I’m clean shaven, and when I appear as "Rabbi Jewy McJewJew," I have a full beard. I try to shoot the Jewy McJewJew stuff early and then do the David Wain stuff after. One time we couldn’t work it out so we had to do a fake beard, which is hard to do for a short beard. I was in the makeup chair for three hours.

Corddry: Lake Bell had to miss an entire season, so we had her character die. When she was able to come back, we just had her burst in at the end of an episode. When someone said they saw her die, she just says, “Long story short, I didn’t die.”

Stern: If we want to have a story about a stuntman getting hurt, we can just say Ken Marino is also a stuntman.

Corddry: We take from M*A*S*H a lot. And St. Elsewhere. That is a show that isn’t afraid to take big swings.

Stern: The hospital is named after its founder, Dr. Arthur Childrens.

Jon Hamm ("Derrick Childrens"): I’ve known David Wain since The State and Stella. When he came to me with the big reveal of Derrick Childrens [Dr. Arthur Childrens’ son] being Malin Akerman’s character in disguise, I thought that was pretty funny.

Malin Akerman ("Dr. Valerie Flame"): We did two days of rehearsals and shot that episode (“The Sultan’s Finger: Live”) in one take. Jon Hamm and I wound up being the same person—which, of course.

Huebel: No one could screw up or the whole thing was ruined.

Wain: I had known Jon Hamm for a really long time, and he has always had a strong comic spark. He was in The Ten, and a lot of his friends are comedians. It never surprised me that he would be as funny as he is on our show. I subsequently worked with him on my show Wet Hot American Summer for Netflix, and he’s hysterical in that.

Corddry: We used to tell the behind-the-scenes stories through the point of view of a TV news magazine show called Newsreaders. We had to start telling those stories a different way when we spun Newsreaders off into its own series, which ran for two seasons on Adult Swim.

Wain: Last season, Cheryl Tiegs was on the show, which was a pretty big deal for the 11-year-old in me. I pushed her to have a scene where I got to be in the bed with her, and that was a real thrill. We’ve had a lot of opportunities to bring in people we know who are funny and people we don’t know who are funny and that we want to work with.

“I found myself too creatively exhausted to do all these other things I want to do, and I want to do other stuff.”

Bell: Season 7 was fun. We had Henry Winkler on a jetpack the same day Megan Mullally got peed on by a horse.

Corddry: The ratings for Childrens Hospital have been very steady over the years.

Stern: At the beginning, Adult Swim tried it earlier in the evening and it didn’t work at all. They very quickly moved it to Thursday at midnights, and the ratings went up.

Stern: We’ve all had some frustration that it’s not on Netflix or Hulu. People outside of Adult Swim have had trouble finding it.

Corddry: I’m not even sure how people watch it, to tell you the truth. The show is notoriously hard to find online without paying for it and that is the result of corporate politics and everything, but I have no problem telling everyone to go watch it on YouTube. It's all up there. It’s on Amazon and iTunes for purchase.

Stern: It’s on Amazon? I didn’t even know that.

Corddry: Childrens never stops. I’m doing Childrens all year around. We’re always either writing it, shooting it, or working on post-production on it. That’s a year-around thing, and some of that is from Miami while I’m working on Ballers.

Principato: Childrens Hospital and Ballers are his full-time life. Everybody else involved had a lot of freedom to do other projects, and I think he was feeling like his bandwidth was limited to these two shows.

Corddry: I found myself too creatively exhausted to do all these other things I want to do and I want to do other stuff, so I decided to make this the last season. People were bummed, but they got it. We’re all friends. We all started as friends before this thing ever happened. It wasn’t like we were saying, “Well this is it so I’ll never see you again.” It was more like, “Alright so what else are we going to do?”

Stern: I’d like to explore Owen and Briggs as a buddy-cop show.

Corddry: That’s a good one.

Stern: There’s a lot of history there.

Corddry: As a prequel?

Stern: Right.

Corddry: Their relationship ended on 9/11, so it would be sort of a ’90s cop show. We’ve talked about that over the years.

Offerman: Megan and I have an unnatural attraction to Rob Huebel, so if we did a spinoff I think a threesome would be inevitable. If Airplane and Life of Brian had a baby, it would be Rob Huebel. He embodies that Leslie Nielsen, deadpan, stupid comedy.

Akerman: One of the attractions to the show for me is that women get to be funny.

Hartig: Women were given a real opportunity to shine. We were allowed to be as bawdy and crazy and funny as the men, which was a real joy to be able to do. When I audition for parts on other shows, I realize how spoiled I was.

Huskey: Finding shows like Monty Python or Mr. Show were incredible moments of discovery for me as a kid. I’d like to think that Childrens Hospital might be that for future comedy nerds.

Hayes: When we were filming the jet pack episode last summer, Henry Winkler said, “One day we won’t be here making this show, and we’ll remember what a wonderful time we had. It’s like coming to summer camp with our friends.” I have been thinking about that the last few weeks knowing now that it was our last season.

Principato: I saw them all mature in their understanding of how to run a TV show. Through the seven seasons, they went from a fun little web series into an Adult Swim series and kept evolving. They were professionals from the beginning, but you could see the show progressing each season.