Code Black: Ed Harbert, Mike Leighton and adaptive storytelling

CBS’s Code Black had to do without its best supporting characters in season 2, so the drama adapted — and rose to new heights without leaving them behind.

There’s chaos at Angels Memorial Hospital. In season 2 of CBS‘s Code Black, the doctors have had to tackle emergencies in a haunted house, a submarine and on a construction crane, and now they are in the middle of a lethal virus outbreak. People are panicking. One staff member has already died. And if you watched season 1, you might have caught yourself wondering one thing.

Where’s Ed Harbert and why isn’t he handling this?

Harbert is the Chief Executive Officer of Angels Memorial Hospital and the administrative voice on Code Black. He was there when the hospital treated two presidential candidates after a debate gone wrong and to appoint Leanne Rorish as interim Director of Emergency Medicine. He would certainly be involved in the wrangling of a lethal health crisis.

But Ed Harbert is played by Jeff Hephner, who is currently committed to his recurring role as Jeff Clarke on NBC‘s Chicago Med. So Code Black has had to write around him, and we’re left imagining that Harbert is somewhere using that M.D. after his name to help handle the outbreak, or maybe just in his office, banging his head against the wall.

The same can be said for Dr. Mike Leighton. Mike joined the Angels staff in season 1, only to fall out of a helicopter in the season 2 premiere. He spent several weeks in a coma before recovering and then decided that he needed to take a break from medicine, leaving the hospital and his little brother Angus.

That was another decision motivated by an off-screen necessity. Tommy Dewey, who plays Mike, is the co-star of Hulu‘s original series Casual. Like Hephner, he simply wasn’t available for more episodes, as much as Code Black loved him and would have gladly kept him on.

What TV fans often don’t realize is that sometimes what happens to a character isn’t motivated by the character or by the writers. Sometimes it has nothing to do with them at all. Sometimes it’s a matter of the actor just not being there and the series having to make decisions in their stead.

Code Black has had to make a lot of those decisions in season 2, and where other series have struggled with their missing pieces, Michael Seitzman and his writing staff have turned them to their advantage. It’s admirable how they’ve been able to keep improving the show despite missing some of the best actors on television.

Dr. Will Campbell (Boris Kodjoe) became a regular this season, and the series has used him to be the one raising the various administrative concerns or putting the hammer down when necessary. That worked perfectly with what viewers already knew about Campbell as a very no-nonsense surgeon.

It also created an antagonistic relationship between him and the rest of the staff, particularly new team member Col. Ethan Willis (Rob Lowe, the best addition to a series in a very long time), and that built a fantastic through-line for Campbell and Willis that audiences were able to enjoy all season long.

Season 2 also enabled Angus Leighton (Harry Ford) to get out from under his brother’s shadow. Mike’s departure dovetailed perfectly into what was already Angus’s central motivation and the next step in the evolution of his character. Maybe him being in a coma was a little harsh, but it served the story that already needed to be written.

Would Angus ever truly have come into his own if Mike was always across the ED floor from him? Would he have had the same moment of conviction, standing up to their father Desmond (Steven Culp), if it hadn’t been with his brother’s future on the line? Every show should move its characters forward in a season and for Angus, season 2 was a major step forward.

Even one of season 2’s most innovative episodes was a product of storytelling by adaptation. “What Lies Beneath” put Campbell and Willis together in the confines of a Russian submarine, and Seitzman told us in our interview that the discussion for that episode began with scheduling conflicts.

“We had some scheduling conflicts with a few cast members,” he said, “and had them only for limited days for that episode, so I had to figure out how to tell a story where several cast members couldn’t be in the same place at the same time. We needed two separate storylines, in two separate locations.”

And that’s before we remember that this season started with the show having lost two original cast members. Raza Jaffrey and Bonnie Somerville did not return for season 2.

Code Black has played the hands it’s been dealt. Yet where other shows and other writers’ rooms have crumbled, this one has not only held serve but continued to improve. It has done a masterful job of not only dealing with its missing characters but finding compelling storylines to tell around those holes.

That’s not to say that season 2 wouldn’t have been great with Ed Harbert or more of Mike Leighton. Of course it would have, considering that Hephner and Dewey are two of the most underrated, hardest-working actors out there. And that’s the icing on this cake: even though those characters are gone, Code Black hasn’t forgotten them. It hasn’t pushed them aside. It’s left the door open both for them and for the fans that enjoyed them.

Mike Leighton isn’t on shift at Angels anymore. But he’s in good health and out there in the world. It’s easy to imagine him coming back from an extended leave of absence and picking up where he left off. Or maybe he’s on a beach somewhere, working on finding himself with a pina colada that has one of those little umbrellas in it. We can know that even if we don’t see him, Mike is okay and that knowledge, that hope is enough.

Likewise, it’ll probably be a while before we lay eyes on Ed Harbert again. It doesn’t seem like Hephner is leaving Chicago Med anytime soon (in fact, there’s a case for making him a series regular). Yet as far as the character’s concerned, his name is still on the door. He’s still the boss. We can come up with our own scenes of Harbert dealing with the media circus or assume he’s treating a patient just off-camera. Or maybe telling the CDC deputy director to shove it.

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These are fantastic characters played by great actors, and Code Black has excelled at telling stories even though it doesn’t have them. But it’s also respected them and kept us missing them, so that when they come back through those hospital doors, we’ll be ready. Sometimes chaos is a beautiful thing.

The Code Black season finale airs Wednesday at 10/9c on CBS.