He also saw, as with The Good Wife, that the show used the genre in a different way. "The Good Wife was very character based and you had, of course, that first scene with Julianna, and her husband, and the disgraced politician aspect, which was a new window into the legal genre," Czuchry says. "I think with The Resident the window into this that's slightly different are these concepts of the system, the business, medical error. What do doctors take on with them when they make a mistake? It's a little bit greedier, a little bit dirtier than we've seen before in the medical genre. "That felt like taking a genre and a new peek into it, which did remind me of what made The Good Wife successful." Czuchry says experiences from his own life – family members who are working medical professionals, and family members who have battled with chronic illness – gave him some understanding of the world he was about to step into. "Many of the themes are very personal because I've had direct connections in my own life," he says.

"I've been in and out of hospitals a lot in terms of family or extended family or myself. All of those elements combined, [I felt] if I had these personal connections there must be so many other people who can connect to this. "As a storyteller, that's what I love, to be able to connect to individuals and make them think, and make them feel, and make them connect on a personal level, and I thought that was possible with this show," Czuchry says. Striking a balance in terms of truth in storytelling is complex. Czuchry acknowledges there is an imperative in narrative drama to be telling a realistic story – in this case, in terms of the medicine – which has to be juggled with the obviously (and fictional) dramatic tentpoles of a television series. "I feel like nowadays you want the balance, if it's too dark you're kind of like, well, the world is in a difficult place, I don't know if I'm going to watch it because it's so dark. So you want the levity at the same time. "In the end it's about the reality," he says. "You want something that's believable in the performances, you want something that's believable in the storytelling, in the writing. You just want to connect to something that you feel is real."

While the arrival of platforms such as Netflix and Hulu, which have no commercial advertising imperative, have altered the game, Czuchry says that has had a knock-on effect on network dramas. "[Streaming platforms] can afford to be a little bit more creative in what they're doing, and that I think, in turn, has forced the networks to up their game and change," he says. "And that's what drew me to this show. They're willing to take those risks." Czuchry describes Dr Conrad Hawkins as "very passionate about his patients, very Machiavellian in the fact that he'll do what it takes to protect his patients, even if that means breaking the rules. If it's for the benefit of his patients, he'll do that. He'll stand up against the system. "And with that he really compartmentalises a lot of the mistakes he makes, or he has a difficulty kind of communicating his emotion in dealing with these things, and we see those kind of cracks come throughout the course of the series where we see his vulnerabilities," he says. To research the role, he says, he consumed a stack of medical literature – notably a handful of books including Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi – and a stack of medical documentaries.

Czuchry also shadowed a doctor working in a private practice who had been suggested to him as a practitioner with a bedside manner similar to Conrad's. "A friend of mine thought that the attitude that he had with patients was right for Conrad," Czuchry says. "And specifically his attitude of telling it like it is to the patients." Perhaps the most stunning revelation in the series is that medical malpractice is the third leading cause of death in the United States, a fact which is visited in the first episode of The Resident and, to some extent, sits as a sort of talisman to its longer-term storytelling. "That was something that did shock me," Czuchry says. "The pilot really sets the tone of what kind of show this is going to be, and that drew me in, that first scene when I read it, because I felt like, oh, this is something different. "If this show can entertain people, or make them laugh, or make them think, or make them feel something, whatever that may be and they'll continue watching, that's my job and that's what I love to do. And hopefully we have enough people who will watch the show and connect in certain ways like that." WHAT The Resident

WHEN Seven, Monday, 9pm