Hippocrates on Canal+: “This is the reality of the hospital”… Thomas Lilt, creator, explains what inspired him to write season 3

After an absence of more than three years, Hippocrates makes a big return to Canal+ this Monday, November 11, for a third season that will once again put emergency room doctors under pressure.

While we are in the heart of summer and many hospital services are closed, Arben (Karim Leclew), Alison (Alice Bellaid), Hugo (Zachary Chasserio), Chloe (Louise Burgoyne) and Olivier Brun (Bully Lanners) must deal with the influx of patients. Educators will quickly realize that the instructions are inappropriate and some will choose not to obey.

With Hippocrates Season 3 set to air, AlloCiné sat down with Thomas Lilt, creator, writer and director of the medical series, to discuss the new burst of episodes.

AlloCiné: Can you talk a little bit about Season 3 of Hippocrates and choosing the theme for this season, which revolves around slow service?

Thomas Lilt : The peculiarity of Season 3 is that it takes place 3 years after the events of Season 2. At the end of season 2, the doctors were overtaken by Covid. The question I asked myself while writing Season 3 was whether or not it revolved around a health crisis.

But I didn’t want to because I think we have suffered enough. I wanted to say something else. So I decided to take some time and think about what really needed to be said about the hospital. And that’s where I got the idea to tell the story of the hospital situation after COVID.

Let’s see what impact this has on the caregivers, nurses and doctors, as well as the patients and the hospital. That was my starting point. For several months during COVID, we cheered and applauded the caregivers.

And after three years, what is left? Not much left. There remains a public hospital that is in even worse shape, with caregivers who have fled because it has become too difficult and painful. So I asked myself why.

What awaits the heroes in this 3rd season?

The third season begins in the summer. Alison no longer works at the hospital, probably because it was too difficult for her. He is now part of Doctor SOS with Hugo. Access to SAMU is very difficult because it is summer and there are less staff.

Many services are closed, including emergency departments at Poincare Hospital. There is a whole population that no longer cares. During a visit to SOS Médecin, Alison finds herself with a patient who is in very bad shape but has nowhere to take her.

So he calls on the people who can help the most, namely Arben, Chloe, Hugo and Olivier Brun. Even if he no longer works with them, they will respond. This patient was not allowed to be there for administrative purposes.

And this is the starting point that will lead to the entire narrative thread of Season 3 Episode 6. The cascade of events leads to the dilemma at the heart of the season: what to do when the system no longer works.

Should we bypass the system to treat people? Shouldn’t we obey and resist? It’s a question that goes beyond the hospital setting and one that we all get asked at one point or another.

During Covid you have returned to work to help carers. What led you to write Season 3?

Returning to the hospital did two things for me while writing Season 3. The first one happened when I just started working. I was there for 10 minutes and walked with the leader to start familiarizing myself with the place and my moods.

At this time, a reanimatologist comes to us and the first sentence he says to the owner: “You know very well that we will not be able to save everyone?It’s March 2020, so we don’t know much about this disease yet.

And that was the first thing I heard. The violence was… We are caretakers and we are not going to save everyone. When we work in a public hospital, we are not there for the pay, we are not there for the quality of life, we are not there for the special working conditions.

We are here because we think it is the most noble. And we live with this weight. We go to the hospital and tell ourselves that we will not be able to save everyone. You have to accept it, and it is very difficult and violent. I think that sentence kept me alive while writing Season 3.

The second is much more unconscious. I almost discovered this while doing interviews to promote Season 3. The birth of California Hospital, which is a secret service in a hospital, came from coming to me during covid.

The first thing I was asked to do was to do something with the tarps in the emergency room to create a non-COVID zone to receive patients who had problems other than the virus. They were just construction tarps and I’m not sure they prevented the virus from getting through. I think that’s where the California hospital came from.

How do you manage to refresh yourself from season to season without always touching on the same themes and always developing your characters?

It’s a challenge every time. It is not easy and I hope I succeeded. This is a question I ask myself every time. My driving force is primarily need. If there were three years between Season 2 and Season 3, it was because I had to let COVID go through and I had to find a theme.

I asked myself what new thing I could say. Season 3’s theme revolving around defiance and civil resistance seemed to me to be a theme that transcended the hospital setting.

And essentially it seemed to solve it. I told myself that I had something there that would allow me to renew myself. In Season 2, I talked about suffering because of the work. On the first page, I talked about the responsibility of young interns. I am telling you something new here. It leads to self-renewal.

And then there are also the heroes. These are my characters, but they don’t belong to me like the actors who play them. To me, they belong on their own. I often ask myself: “What are they doing at the moment? What is Arben doing while I’m doing this interview? What does Alison do?“.

So when I started writing, I wondered what happened to them three years later. And so I tell myself that they are part of SOS Médecin, that I tell myself that Olivier Brun has changed profoundly, affected by COVID and the death of his intern in the second season.

He tells himself that in the end, not everything is worth treating people. First of all, you need to protect yourself. All this allows me to renew myself and be honest and avoid simply creating new adventures. Adventure for adventure’s sake was never my driving force at Hippocrates.

It’s very pretentious and unashamed, but I try to be a little visionary. That’s why I didn’t tell you about Covid. I also like to tell the story of a group, rather than of individuals. My story is based on a group and what I like is adding characters. This year it is William Lebghili who arrives in David’s shoes.

The third thing that allows me to refresh is trying to immerse myself in the memories of the hospital. And that’s why I wanted to talk about old people. It’s not a very glamorous topic, but it’s the reality of the hospital. And this is very concerning to me because a society that can no longer take care of its elderly is dramatic. And deep down, it affects us all because one day it could be us. That’s why I wanted to talk about it.

And another inspiration for me is the theme of mental illness, which is ubiquitous in Hippocrates. He was in season 2 and is also in season 3. In France we do not know how to deal with this suffering.

We know how to fix a broken leg and we know how to do extraordinary things with very complex pathologies. But mental illness is very difficult, especially in emergency rooms. We are not prepared at all. And that motivates me because I tell myself there is more to say.

Unlike the first two seasons, which had a frenetic pace, Season 3 is much calmer, sometimes even more…

This is a mixture. It is both calm and not at all calm. I think these are impressions that are unique to each person. But when I talk about the hospital, I try not to lie. And here I am talking about a hospital operating at half capacity.

Then the question of availability arises, because the population area around the hospital needs care, especially in the middle of summer, when there are few private doctors because they are on vacation. All that remains is the emergency room to house them. So what do we do in this situation? I think this is a false sense of peace and above all we have a picture of a dying hospital.