#’The Resident’ Boss on the CoNic Baby, Kit and Bell’s ‘Interesting’ Dynamic, and More

The Resident has said goodbye to one of its original cast members, Shaunette Renée Wilson (who played Dr. Mina Okafor), and while moving on won’t be easy, it will happen.

The rest of the characters “begin to make the shift from feeling grief about Mina to moving on with their lives,” co-showrunner Andrew Chapman tells TV Insider.

And there is quite a bit coming up, from nurse practitioner Nic Nevin (Emily VanCamp) giving birth, and seeing her and Dr. Conrad Hawkins (Matt Czuchry) as parents; to Dr. Kit Voss (Jane Leeves) continuing to kill it as the hospital’s CEO; to possible love connections for the doctors. Chapman previews what’s to come in the rest of Season 4 below.

With Nic’s due date approaching, what can you tease about when we’ll meet her and Conrad’s baby?

Andrew Chapman: I’m not going to tell you what episode it is, but it will be this season, I promise you that — but [their baby’s birth] will be fun and joyous. You’re gonna love the fun of the baby and the fun of them becoming parents and just entering a new phase of CoNic. Having children changes everybody on a core level and it will change them on a core level.

Dr. Barrett Cain’s [Morris Chestnut] return to the OR didn’t go as planned, but he also seems to be finding life outside the hospital with Rose [Cara Ricketts].

[What] we love about Morris Chestnut and the Cain character is that he’s such a good villain — and Morris plays a great villain, but he’s actually a really nice guy underneath it all. And so what we really love to do and what we will do for the rest of the season is play with that sort of dichotomy, that split personality of, he’s kind of a monster, but he kind of has a heart of gold. We’ll redeem him a little bit.

We’ll see an up-and-down relationship with Rose, who’s not his patient, but they met as patients, which is great. We love the Rose storyline of a sickle cell patient who is, as you will see, going to be involved in efforts to cure sickle cell, which really do exist out there and are incredibly important and they are important to a community that we feel is underserved in Atlanta, the African-American community. She’s very representational of that, and we love that. And she is a great actress and you will just love how she goes and where she goes with Morris. Her scenes with Cain through the rest of the season — they’re both in the rest of the season — are absolutely spectacular.

I love how much Kit is absolutely killing it as CEO. What’s the next challenge for her?

She’ll continue to still have the same challenges of running a hospital and we, again, like you, love that she’s an ass-kicker — and the moral center of the show. People come to her for advice. They come to her for the right and wrong questions and she dispenses wisdom and she does it with a smile and with love and compassion.

We really wanted to show a powerful woman in a position of changing other people’s lives, making these choices that weren’t bullying [or] nasty. They were compassionate and they were wise. She is so nailing that, and we just love that. There will be continued issues with Chastain and you’ll see that there’ll be continued money issues with it being a public hospital. She’s going to come up with this really great solution to those problems, but it’s a complicated solution. The ultimate answer is complicated and that will all play out in the season finale.

After a rough start to the season for Dr. Devon Pravesh [Manish Dayal], it looks like there may be some happiness coming for him. Are he and Leela [Anuja Joshi] going to be the next Chastain romance?

I can neither confirm nor deny that. Let’s just say that we love Leela. We love the actress, Anuja, who plays Leela. We think she’s going to be a huge star. She is an Indian-American woman who really is like the girl next door. She’s so smart and stubborn and she’s got dyslexia and she so represents the struggle to be heard and to be taken seriously and to be a great doctor. We are utterly in love with her and we want to make her huge in the show. And Devon, who we obviously also love, is just growing as a doctor and as a person. They will have a relationship. If it’s going to go to the love relationship, I’m not going to give that away, but you should keep your eyes peeled for that possibility.

Kit and [Dr. Randolph] Bell [Bruce Greenwood] seem to have taken over as the leading will-they-won’t-they couple. What did you want to do with their relationship this season?

That is really an interesting question. We talk about that a lot and we talk to Jane Leeves and Bruce Greenwood a lot about that. They’re an interesting couple because they are really the wise duo at the top of the hospital and Bell’s completely been redeemed from the sort of evil villain that he was in Season 1. We love their sort of great best friends quality that they have. But we also see that there’s a little something going on between them and there’s just a hint of a will-they-won’t-they thing going on and they are so comfortable with each other. It’s both a great “old friends” and then a possible “hmm, could there be something more?” and we’ll see that continue through the rest of the season.

Bell’s character development has been spectacular. It’s amazing how far he’s come.

He’s so wonderful, too. Bruce Greenwood is such a great actor and fills the character with humanity. I think that really comes across on screen.

He’s also kind of redeemed himself in the eyes of [his stepson] Jake [Conrad Ricamora] because they seem to be in a much better place, but are there more bumps in the road for them?

Yep. First of all, Conrad Ricamora is a wonderful actor also. We just love that this season for Bell has been so much about family and the redemptive quality of caring as a parent, whether that child is your biological child, your adoptive child, [or] your child by marriage. There’s a real growing-up process in Bell. It’s never going to be a straight line of happiness because that’s not the way the world works. But Jake and Bell are going to get stronger and stronger. We think that that’s just such a sweet and powerful way to tell a story about family.

You keep bringing in great people to the show.

Thank you. We’ve lost somebody who was dear to our heart, who really was part of the foundational DNA of the show in Shaunette, but we’ve brought in Anuja, Conrad, Jessica Lucas [who plays Dr. Billie Sutton]. We feel like all three of those people are just distinct characters, distinct doctors with distinct points of view, troubles. They all are looking for their own forms of redemption on the show. You lose people and it’s heartbreaking. And then you just push forward and create new characters that you fall in love with and you hope the audience falls in love with, too.

Speaking of Billie, what’s coming up for her? She’s settling back in somewhat nicely at Chastain.

I’m glad you asked. The Billie character is going to be super roller coaster-y and there are going to be some bombshell revelations coming up in the episodes to come, both in her relationships to other characters, and also from her past. You’re definitely going to want to keep your eyes peeled for that. Because in the last two, three episodes, things definitely pop up for Billie that are going to be fun and heartbreaking and really powerful.

The Resident, Tuesdays, 8/7c, Fox