I recently participated in a press conference with Erica Durance for a brief introduction and overview into NBC’s newly-announced medical drama Saving Hope.

Character Takes on New Drama

As the first scenes of the NBC series unfold, Durance’s character, Dr. Alex Reid, is seen as an accomplished medical doctor whose world is turned upside down when her fiancé, Dr. Charlie Harris, becomes comatose following a car crash. Following this tragedy, Reid has conflicting emotions while dealing with her day-to-day duties and confronting the grief and adjustment to what is happening in her own life. All the while, her fiancé, played by Michael Shanks, walks the hospital corridors in spirit, if you will, and couples his existence in a comatose state with the imparting of his knowledge in diagnosing and treating the hospital’s patients.

Emotions Become Juggling Act

Durance reveals in the conference that “one of our biggest concerns is how to keep the storylines fresh and interesting and new. After all, my character can’t really leave the hospital.”

She explains, “You have the fun, quirky, light stuff going on, and then you have the main course of what’s happening with my character. She’s trying to work on the patients herself. She’s dealing with trying to keep her own job.”

Her World Turns Upside Down

Describing the series as “an interesting, wonderful love story that’s trying to connect between two worlds, integrated with all the other things that are going on,” Durance describes Reid as “a very pragmatic person who believes only in what she can see and touch and the tangible. She is basically a self-made woman who’s worked her way through school. This is what she’s wanted to do her whole life. Then she falls in love with the Chief of Surgery, who is opposite from her and brings out this other side in her. And because he’s gone into this coma, she’s forced to look into what she really believes about life. You see her go through this range of emotions in dealing with her grief.”

Durance continues, “The show does these wonderful flashbacks into her relationship with Charlie. And we see the kind of woman that she was before this happened. The overall theme of it is about saving and holding on to hope in your own life and looking for positivity and what we do in our own ways to reach for human contact.”

It’s an Easy Transition

Durance has been in talks for her role since last May, and shot the pilot last July in Toronto.

“I’m very proud of our cast,” she says. “The only one that I’ve worked with before is Michael, and I’ve known him for a long time. That makes it incredibly easy for me. It’s been fun.”

Saving Hope airs Thursdays on NBC.

Cheryl has been a freelance TV/film writer for more than 10 years. Simultaneously, she has worked in PR for Bon Jovi Productions in NYC, PolyGram Records (also in NYC), and Rogers & Cowan Public Relations. Cheryl has published articles at suite101.com, “Sci-Fi Entertainment” magazine, and “Soap Opera Weekly.” She was also a credited researcher for English author Denis Meikle’s JOHNNY DEPP: A KIND OF ILLUSION. Cheryl enjoys writing for the entertainment industry and meeting new people. She is also an animal lover. 

This article originally appeared at suite101.com.