Canadian Showrunner David Shore Trusts His Internal Timer as Shaun and Lea Hit a Rough Patch on THE GOOD DOCTOR

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede An alarm clock had been tenuously ticking on the romantic relationship between Dr. Shaun Murphy, played by Freddie Highmore, and his fiancée Lea Dilallo, played by Paige Spara, on THE GOOD DOCTOR. After all, things had been going pretty well for quite a while. Shaun, who is on the autism spectrum, wasn’t always clear on the intricacies of his responsibilities on the road from boyfriend to husband, but Lea was always there with a helping hand, and a smile. But THE GOOD DOCTOR is a TV drama, and if everyone simply lived happily ever after, there wouldn’t be much story left to tell. Shaun and Lea hit a big bump in the fall finale last November, and Shaun called off the wedding. Now, as Season 5 picks up with a new episode, Monday, Feb. 28, at 10 p.m. ET on CTV, CTV.ca, and the CTV app, viewers will get an update on the state of the union, so to speak. In a virtual roundtable interview with THE GOOD DOCTOR’s Canadian showrunner and executive producer David Shore, he was asked about the timing and rhythm of such things. As a TV veteran, does Shore have an internal clock ticking away, telling him when it’s time to shake up an on-screen relationship? “Yeah, um, I guess I do, on some level,” Shore said. “I try to approach it as a viewer. Not to go, ‘what would the viewers want?’ It’s more, viewing myself as a typical viewer, and asking, ‘what do I want? What would I find entertaining, and dramatic, and challenging?’ At a certain point, you just feel like, okay, we’ve done that, so what’s new? What’s fresh? Where do we go now? You get a gut feeling about the need to mix things up.” But Shore insisted there are many different ways to do it. “That doesn’t mean we have to condemn things,” Shore said. “That doesn’t mean things have to go to hell. The characters have to face challenges, you know, as we all do. But I like to think we’re a show about hope! These are good people trying to do good things. And I think it’s very realistic. Not everything good always happens to them, or their patients. Bad things happen. Challenges are faced. But this is not a show about criminals. It’s not a show about bad guys. It’s a show about the 99% of the world that are just decent people trying to do their best.” Shore, who is a lawyer by training, comes by his internal clock honestly as far as his chosen medical genre is concerned. He has 13 seasons of medical shows under his belt (five with THE GOOD DOCTOR, and eight with HOUSE), so it must be getting tough not to repeat himself medically, right? “The challenge, just generally, aside from the medicine, is, how do you surprise people (the viewers) who are expecting to be surprised?” Shore said. “But there are a couple of answers here. First, we could do an episode about a heart transplant, and it’d be very different than a GREY’S ANATOMY episode about a heart transplant, because of the characters involved, and the ethical issues, and how they approach it, and how it affects them. But also, here’s what I figured out. When I started doing medical shows, I was very worried that we weren’t going to have enough medical stories to sustain us. But what I have unfortunately found out – which has been very good for me, and very unfortunate for humanity – is that there are just a remarkable number of ways for the human body to break down.” Shore admitted that the makers of THE GOOD DOCTOR have started to think about what the long-term future holds. Not in terms of ending the show any time soon – “we want to keep it going for a while,” he assured – but might some kind of spinoff be in the cards? “I hope so – yeah, I mean, I don’t know, nothing’s definitive, but we have found ourselves lately, internally, talking about the possibility,” he said. “There’s nothing specifically planned yet. But I think that’d be really exciting. The heart and soul of this show, I would love to bring to another show.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv