Medical dramas have long been built around brilliance. The gifted surgeon. The impossible diagnosis. The life-or-death operation that only the best doctor in the hospital can pull off. But The F Ward takes a different approach, asking what happens when the people holding the scalpel are the ones still trying to put themselves back together.
Created by Dan Edwards and Kelsey Munro, the Australian drama follows a group of medical interns whose careers have already come off the rails. Given one final opportunity at Sydney’s underfunded Pines Hospital, each must confront the personal failings that derailed their first year as doctors while navigating impossible surgeries, hospital politics and the emotional toll of caring for others before they’ve figured out how to care for themselves.
For co-creator Dan Edwards, that premise was born from a simple but compelling idea: what if failure, rather than excellence, became the foundation of a medical drama? After years researching Australia’s healthcare system and speaking with intern doctors at every stage of their first year, Edwards and Munro shaped a series that uses medicine as the backdrop for something more character-driven – a workplace drama about flawed young people learning whether they’re capable of change. Even the crumbling Pines Hospital, inspired in part by Sydney’s former Mona Vale Hospital, becomes a metaphor for lives and careers hanging in the balance.
Ahead of the show’s premiere, Peter Gray spoke with Edwards about why failure can create better doctors, the generational divide at the heart of the series, finding humour in the darkest hospital corridors, and why the show’s real challenge isn’t whether its interns deserve a second chance, but whether they’re willing to earn one.
I wanted to ask about failure instead of excellence, because I feel like most medical dramas celebrate the best doctors in the hospital, but The F Ward is built around people who almost didn’t get to become doctors at all. What do you feel failure allows people to do that excellence never could?
I think the conceit of this retention program is the human resource of young doctors. By the time someone starts practising medicine, close to a million dollars of public money has gone into their education and training. So every time you lose one, that’s an immense drain on the state’s resources, both financially and professionally.
The thinking behind the show was that these are people who have made mistakes, who have stumbled, but those mistakes can actually become stepping stones to becoming better, more well-rounded doctors. The retention program is about recognising that these are people who set out to dedicate their lives to medicine, and instead of writing them off because of one major mistake, giving them a second chance. In doing so, you might actually retain some of the very best people in the profession.
It gives the series a different set of stakes than we’re used to seeing in a medical drama. It’s also reflective of a country like Australia, where our resources are finite. Our healthcare system is undoubtedly stretched and underfunded, but it’s also extraordinary. That became really apparent during our research for the show.
Over several years, we spoke to around 25 intern doctors at the beginning, middle and end of their internships. The change in perspective was remarkable. The way they viewed each other, the profession and where they wanted to go by the end of the process was often completely different to where they started.
So, to answer your question, the fact that they’ve all failed in some way – or, in one character’s case, simply because she was older and a single mother, which was perceived as a failure – created really interesting stakes for the series.
Underneath all of the emergencies, this is a workplace drama about identity. Was medicine simply the most extreme environment to ask the question, “Can someone genuinely change?”
Yeah, well, medicine is a great setting. We try to steer away from the term “story engines” because, if you look at (Roadshow) Rough Diamond shows, a lot of them actually don’t rely on traditional story engines. But medical dramas, by their very nature, do. People get sick, they come into hospital, and hopefully they get saved -mor they don’t.
That said, we weren’t looking to make another traditional hospital drama like the network television shows we saw in Australia 10 or 15 years ago. I think we were all influenced by series like Industry. They’re really character studies about young, intelligent people who are deeply flawed, all sharpening their skills, battling their egos and trying to do their best.
The difference here is that the stakes happen to be life and death. Those were the kinds of shows we were interested in making, and it just so happened that the medical drama was the one we were able to sell.
One of the best lines that Gloria delivers – because it has such a sense of irony to it – is when she says that the hospital isn’t a safe space. It almost feels like a mission statement for the series. Was that line your way of challenging the modern instinct to protect people from failure rather than prepare for it?
I think that was very much a generational fault line. To me, it was Gen Z versus the millennials. So yes, to answer your question, there absolutely is that dynamic, but I also think there’s a genuine generational friction at play. Some of that came out of the research we did into how Gen Z differs from previous generations, particularly in the way they put themselves forward and deal with vulnerability.
There’s this idea that there’s almost a reluctance to try too hard because, if you fail, it might be seen as cringe. That mindset creates some really interesting tension, and you see a lot of that generational rub come through Gloria in particular.
The show constantly talks about second chances, but I don’t really think it’s asking whether these interns deserve forgiveness. It’s asking whether they’re willing to earn it. Was that distinction important when you were writing?
Yeah. (The character of) Ellie’s actually a good example. Her failure isn’t that she killed somebody – doctors lose patients. People die. That’s unfortunately part of the job. She’s still a good doctor. Her real failure is that she lost all confidence and couldn’t show back up. She couldn’t come back from it.
I guess that’s the common thread with all of them. Their failures aren’t really about competence; they’re character issues that need to be addressed. In Jimmy’s case, he’s too gung-ho. He breaks the rules, and he’s absolutely convinced he’s right. So it’s not really about whether they deserve a second chance. It’s about whether they’re capable of changing.
The hospital very much becomes its own character (too). The Pines feels like it’s physically falling apart at the same time as the interns are. Did the hospital become a metaphor before it became a setting?
Yeah, it was. Originally, we imagined the hospital as Mona Vale Hospital. My grandmother spent time in a nursing home towards the end of her life, and she’d actually throw herself out of bed and injure herself just so she’d be taken to the old Mona Vale Hospital. She’d much rather be there than back at the home because it had this incredible view out over the ocean. She could watch the whales, and she absolutely loved it.
Whenever we’d visit her, we’d notice how rundown the place was. None of the modern equipment really fit the building anymore, so there were wires running everywhere, tape across the floors – it had this wonderfully lived-in, slightly chaotic feel. We kept saying, ‘This would make such an interesting setting,’ because it was such a busy hospital in such a spectacular location. It was a real shame when it was eventually torn down.
So we took the character of that hospital and combined it with an old Avon factory in Frenchs Forest. Avon had built this beautiful Brutalist building there, and we digitally placed it right on the coastline. There’s also a metaphor at play. In our version of the world, climate change is eventually going to reclaim that stretch of coastline, which is the only reason the hospital still exists. Otherwise, the government would have sold the land off for apartments. So, yes, it’s very much an intentional metaphor.
It’s probably the first time I’ve watched a medical show and thought, “God, that’s a really nice hospital view right there.” And as you mentioned Jimmy before, he’s someone who fascinates me because he’s brilliant, but that confidence and arrogance can often look identical until something goes wrong. Was he designed to sit permanently on that knife edge?
That’s definitely where he starts, and it’s something he wrestles with right through to the end of the season. I think Jimmy probably feels like he’s always had to outperform his peers, and because of that he’s developed an enormous amount of confidence. He’s a great people person. He’s not the type of psychopath who lacks empathy – he genuinely cares about other people. But his confidence sits very close to arrogance, and that’s something he constantly has to wrestle with throughout season one.
As you said that you spoke to so many different people, I feel like it’s one of those jobs where you just have to have a sense of humour. Some of the show’s funniest moment happen seconds before or after life and death situations. Were you deliberately trying to capture the emotional whiplash that real medical staff used to survive?
Yeah, I think our outlook has always been that the best dramas are the ones that feel truthful. They shouldn’t feel contrived or like the drama exists simply because the writer wants to manufacture it. So, on one hand, it has to feel authentic. But on the other, it also has to have a sense of humour and an underlying optimism.
The reality is that a lot of the dark, difficult, painful – even gross – things that happen in hospitals are funny as well. That’s because, for the people working there, it’s their everyday environment. As you said, it’s their workplace. They’re not experiencing these situations for the first time, so naturally they find moments of levity in them.
And one of the things that I really loved when to Jeremy Sims’s character, because he could have been written as this sort-of mustache-twirling antagonist. But he’s the embodiment of an old medical culture that refuses to disappear. Was it important that the real enemy isn’t just one man, but the system that he represents?
Yeah, and rather than making him a two-dimensional cliché, we wanted him to be conflicted. He’s at that point in his career where he can probably feel his influence beginning to wane. Younger surgeons are coming through, GPs are likely referring patients to them instead, and he’s hanging on. He’s still a legend in the profession, but he’s also confronting the reality that things are changing around him.
So while he does represent the old guard, he’s not without his reasons. You can understand why he reacts the way he does, even if some of the ways he tries to deal with that change are very old-fashioned – and ultimately quite hurtful.
And you mentioned Ellie before as a great example of someone who’s carrying guilt long before they walk into the hospital. I feel like so many characters are harboring that. Were you interested in writing people who were trying to save strangers before they haven’t figured out how to save themselves yet?
Yeah, I think there’s an element of that in all of them. All of the doctors, all of the interns, are dedicating themselves to saving other people, but they haven’t really figured out how to save themselves.
Ellie’s story is perhaps the clearest example of that. She was the university medallist, the quintessential Type A student who seemed destined to go straight into surgery and then into whatever specialty she chose. But she got derailed, and the real challenge wasn’t the setback itself – it was that she couldn’t recover from it.
The F Ward is available to stream on Stan Australia from July 17th, 2026.
