For me, the next challenge is can we create the next great ER show. Whether you loved it or hated it, there was no doubt that ER the TV series influenced America’s vision of what emergency medicine was, often in positive ways. I don’t think we’ve had a show like that on any major platform for a while. [We want to] create a fiction series that touches people and shows them the challenges of the field and ultimately proves that emergency physicians have the combined challenge of being methodical, almost machinelike, in their intensity and pace at times, but also have the incredible ability of being humanistic and healers.

KK: You recently started your first position out of residency. Are you cutting back on your shifts yet?

RM: No, not yet. I’m still full-time for the moment and partly out of respect for where I am in my training. I think young attendings, and even veteran attendings, are all continuously learning. If things start to really pick up on this CBS project, I’ll have to revisit some things. I will say this much: I would never give up my clinical shifts, even if I had to do one every two weeks—just something to stay fresh. [Med school was] too much of an investment to abandon and too much of something that my brain needs to be present. If I suddenly took that away, it would screw up the equilibrium, and I don’t know if, even creatively, I would be as functional.

KK: Final thoughts?

RM: I feel relieved that we’ve been able to make something that sort of brings our specialty together. When we’ve shown it across the country—whether it’s from academic or private programs, public or not-for-profit, and everything in between—it is nice when, as physicians, we all come together and say, “There are themes in here that we all know and all live with together.” There’s something powerful in that.