‘I just want to deliver a great final chapter for these characters’
The Good Doctor’s Shaun Murphy (Freddie Highmore) is back for his final rounds — and he’s a dad! The Season 7 premiere introduced us to Shaun as a father, and it seems like he’s adapting to new parenthood very well. The final season of the ABC drama picks up about two weeks after Lea (Paige Spara) gave birth to their son, Steve, and Shaun is ready for his first day back at work.
Shaun’s first day back at the hospital illuminates his kryptonite as a new dad. He may be great at changing diapers, but he struggles with deviations from Steve’s schedule and Lea’s more free-flowing attitude about how she spends the day with her son. The friction isn’t helped by the fact that Glassman (Richard Schiff) still isn’t speaking to Shaun after the younger surgeon forced Glassman to take an early retirement from surgery at the end of Season 6.
Glassman and Shaun aren’t the only ones dealing with unresolved tension in the Season 7 premiere. Morgan (Fiona Gubelmann) and Park (Will Yun Lee) have a lot to figure out about their new parenting dynamic, as their adopted daughter needs an emergency transplant in the season premiere. The couple reconciled at the end of last season, but the premiere makes it obvious that they still have a lot to figure out — and a lot of trust to build — if they wish to keep their fragile family unit intact.
Finally, since Andrews (Hill Harper) stepped down as hospital president, Lim (Christina Chang) and Glassman are charged with co-running the hospital together. It’s a job that neither of them wants, and it should make for an interesting time watching them delegate the paperwork and hard decisions.
TV Guide spoke with co-showrunner Liz Friedman about these season premiere developments and what to expect in the upcoming final season of The Good Doctor.
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What is on the bucket list that you felt like you needed to check off before you could say goodbye to Shaun Murphy?
Liz Friedman: Well, I am still working through saying goodbye to Shaun Murphy, to tell the truth. Between the character and this group of people who I love working with, it’s a process. What I’ve been thinking about and talking about with the whole team of writers and David [Shore, co-showrunner], is: How do we give this character a proper send-off? Where do we want to leave him? Where is he going? Especially with a show like this one, he’s not going to be on camera anymore, but he’s somewhere out there. He’s doing his thing. So I’m just trying to figure out what that is.
Why did year seven feel like the year to end the show?
Friedman: A lot of it was that ABC said “You’re done with the story.” I’m extremely grateful that they made that decision in a fashion where we have time to tell the ending the way we want to do it. That makes a big difference. It’s a short season because of the strikes, but I’m super happy with the episodes the we have filmed so far. I am happy with the scripts we are working on now. We are working on the finale, and I just want to deliver a great final chapter for these characters.
How is Shaun adapting to being a father?
Friedman: He’s having a great time… It’s a big shift. What we liked about doing this with Shaun is showing the ways in which he’s just a crackerjack dad and then the ways in which he’s challenged that he wasn’t expecting. People who are on the spectrum are sometimes very sensitive to smells and can have an issue with diaper changing, but we thought about Shaun existing in the medical world. So what if he’s great at that? But what if the flexibility of negotiating with your partner over the baby’s schedule is a challenge for him? He’s got thee amazing strengths, and the love for your child inspires you to do anything. And then [there are] places where this really goes against having an orderly existence… but when you’re a new parent, everybody is challenged. Shaun has his specific challenges, and Lea has her specific challenges.
On that note, how does having Steve affect Shaun and Lea’s relationship this season?
Friedman: They’re very different but complementary people. Lea’s got a certain free-spiritedness, and Shaun tends to be very ordered and buttoned down. They really do appreciate that about each other. They are coming to each wanting to have their own way of handling their relationship with their son. That’s going to be a little more conflict. How do we get our chocolate and peanut butter to mix together in a nice way? It’s going to be a struggle for them.
Does Steve help mend the fences between Shaun and Glassman after they fell out last season?
Friedman: [Shaun and Glassman’s relationship] is quite frigid at the start of Season 7. I do think that babies can heal a lot. They have a long relationship, and what happened at the end of last season is very complicated. I think Glassman has real reasons to be upset about what happened. I think Shaun has reason to have feelings about Glassman’s absence at Steve’s birth. It’s going to take them a bit to heal and get back to each other.
Morgan and Park seemed to mend their relationship at the end of last season, but are they truly on the same page in Season 7?
Friedman: It’s an adjustment. They do love each other, but being parents is different than being partners. In a lot of ways, they’re incredibly suited to the task, but they’ve got a struggle to figure out exactly what their relationship is now and how it changes or doesn’t change.
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What can you say about the new hospital president situation and how that continues this season?
Friedman: It’s a terrible job. It’s one that we discover nobody particularly wants. I think we’ve found a way to get some really fun stories out of that, with people having to deal with managing this big institution.
Can we expect any familiar faces to return in Season 7?
Friedman: I can tell you that we’re bringing in two new med students who we are really excited about, [played by] Kayla Cromer and Wavyy Jonez. What’s really fun about med students is they really walk out of classrooms in medical school and then start their third year by walking into a hospital. They’re dealing with patients, and they have no experience with that. They can be very book-smart and scientifically smart, but they don’t know how to do a blood draw. They don’t know how to bandage a wound. They’ve never talked to a patient. They’ve never told anyone that their relative just died. We have these two new characters come in who really are the babes in the medical woods. One of them is very interested being a surgeon. Her name is Charlie, and she went into medicine because she saw Shaun Murphy. She saw him rescue that boy from our pilot in a viral video and decided then that she wanted to be a doctor and a surgeon. So Shaun is her hero. She is also on the spectrum.
And then Dom is a former football player. He has no interest in being a surgeon and is really just trying to check a box to get through his surgery rotation. He is going to find himself challenged in a way he never saw coming. So we have these two new, very green characters and it’s a lot of fun to see how people handle them.
We’ve seen Shaun struggle with autistic patients before. What is his attitude towards Charlie when she arrives?
Friedman: I think that the relationship is going to be very challenging for both of them in some very surprising ways. Beyond that, you’re just going to have to wait and watch.
Do you have a message for any of the fans tuning in to the final season?
Friedman: Just come, watch, enjoy, be entertained. I hope you know we try to broaden people’s horizons. I feel like the message of the show is about the value of acceptance and embracing difference, and that really embracing differences is different than tolerance.
