The Good Doctor's David Shore: Why we made the coronavirus-themed Season 4 premiere "visceral"

Variety

"When you’re working on something, you sort of put your head down and get to work and there’s this intellectual part of your brain that takes over. You’re aware of the emotional responses — you have to be aware of them and you have to embrace them and you have to be trying to bring them out in the audience — but it’s kind of a detached approach that you have to take to writing," the showrunner tells EW. "Then it sorts of comes back and hits when you’re watching it. What you said, I’ve been hearing it from so many people in a way I honestly didn’t anticipate. We were just trying to be honest. We always feel a responsibility to be honest with all of our stories and to not just play into melodrama [and depict] just real people with people problems in real situations, and to embrace that and embrace the story that’s in that week after week. We felt an added obligation here in terms of getting the medicine right — and the medicine was changing constantly — and to accurately portray what so many people are going through right now. So yes, we felt an added weight in that regard. I think the word is 'visceral.' People watching it, it’s hitting them, I think, harder than an average show because it’s so about what we’re all going through right now. ALSO: Freddie Highmore weighs in on The Good Doctor premiere's pandemic storyline.