TV Talk: How CBS’s ‘Watson’ recreates Pittsburgh in British Columbia

VANCOUVER, Canada — Turns out Pittsburgh is big enough for two TV medical dramas.

Three weeks after streaming service Max debuted “The Pitt,” set at a fictionalized version of Allegheny General Hospital on the North Side, CBS premieres “Watson” (approximately 10 p.m. today following the AFC Championship game, KDKA-TV), a medical mystery drama set at ficti onal University Hospital of Pittsburgh in Oakland.

That location is apparent pretty quickly as series creator and Squirrel Hill native Craig Sweeny (“Limitless”) gives a tour of the “Watson” sets in early November: An enormous drapery (called a translight) with an image of the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning printed on it hangs outside the windows of a waiting room area of UHOP.

The photo of the Cathedral of Learning was taken from a balcony at The Oaklander Hotel, where the cast and crew stayed when they filmed for three days in Pittsburgh in June 2023 before returning to Vancouver to shoot the bulk of the series.

“I really enjoyed the city of Pittsburgh,” said Morris Chestnut, who stars in the show as Dr. John Watson. “There’s a lot of history there. Everyone was very friendly and kind. And, you know, I’m partial to the Steelers.”

Scenes shot over those three days in Pittsburgh turn up in several episodes of the first season and are most heavily featured in the premiere, which culminates in a meeting filmed on the Duquesne Incline.

A scene in the season finale will also take place on the incline, but in that instance the production built an incline replica on the stage in Vancouver because that was more cost-effective than a return trip to Pittsburgh. Sweeny said the crew shot footage from the incline during their Pittsburgh visit that will be inserted via green-screen special effects as a backdrop outside the windows of the prop incline.

“We had to train the people in the scenes to react as the (incline) car starts and stops at the top and the bottom,” Sweeny said.

Additional Pittsburgh touches through five episodes made available for review include a Giant Eagle shopping bag, use of “yinz,” a Carnegie Mellon T-shirt and a T-shirt emblazoned with Vicious Blades (the local metal band) in the pilot; mentions of Lawrenceville’s Pusadee’s Garden restaurant in Episode 2 (airing in the show’s regular time period, 9 p.m. Sunday, on Feb. 16); a reference to the late CMU physicist Walter Kohn in Episode 3; Pitt Medical School and a Jerome Bettis Steelers jersey in Episode 4; and name checks of Taylor Allderdice High School, Stanton Heights, Homewood and Wilkinsburg in Episode 5.

“In almost all of our episodes, you’ll see establishing shots of Lawrenceville or Squirrel Hill or Point Breeze,” Sweeny said. “I gave (the second unit crew) a very specific shopping list, and they went out with cars and drones and made it happen.”

That includes a scene of a silver Austin-Healey, driven by Watson’s aide-de-camp Shinwell Johnson (Ritchie Coster), zooming past the Lawrenceville sign in the premiere. The car was put on a flatbed trailer, driven to Pittsburgh for filming, then returned to the flatbed trailer and trucked back to Vancouver.

In “Watson,” Chestnut’s character resumes his medical career as the head of a clinic specializing in rare medical disorders six months after the death of his best friend and mentor, Sherlock Holmes. Holmes left Watson the funds to create the Holmes Clinic for Diagnostic Medicine in an old building attached to the modern UHOP.

Watson is aided by a team of “doc-tectives,” as Chestnut calls them, including mysterious, manipulative Dr. Ingrid Derian (Eve Harlow, “The Night Agent,” “Star Trek: Discovery”), Southern-­accented Dr. Sasha Lubbock (Inga Schlingmann, “So Help Me Todd”) and a set of twins: the bespectacled, uptight Dr. Stephens Croft, and his more easygoing brother, Dr. Adam Croft, both played by actor Peter Mark Kendall (“Kaleidoscope”).

“Watson” films mostly on stages at Bridge Studios, the British Columbia studio that was home to ABC’s “The Good Doctor.” “Watson” got a sweetheart deal on panes of glass, desks and medical supplies and equipment when “The Good Doctor,” which ended its seven-season run in May, tore down its sets in early 2024 just as “Watson” was getting ready to begin construction on its hospital sets.

In early November, the cast filmed scenes for the 12th (of 13) episodes that comprise the first season. The episode, written by freelancers Heather Ross and former Carnegie Mellon University student Adam Samuel Goldman, finds Watson and his team in a race to find a cure for a life-threatening malady.

In the Holmes Clinic lab, Watson and Sasha prepare to examine cultures in petri dishes that contain a possible cure. Ingrid, mysterious as always, observes the scene.

On the first take, Chestnut stumbles over medical jargon, a job hazard on any medical show. After another take, director Jeff Byrd asks Harlow to take “a baby step” back and instructs her to evince the hint of a smile as Harlow’s Ingrid watches Watson and Sasha puzzle over the cultures. In between takes, the actors chat amiably with Harlow and Schlingmann, cracking one another up.

During a break in filming, Harlow and Schlingmann said that during their Pittsburgh visit the actors bonded, buying sweatshirts from the University of Pittsburgh student store.

“It was great to all be together, getting to know each other in the city that we’re supposed to be in,” Schlingmann said.

“I went to a bunch of museums and then the Mattress Factory,” Harlow said. “And I’m like, is this important to the history of Pittsburgh? They had this factory where they made mattresses? And they’re like, ‘No, no, it’s a modern art museum.’ I’ve been to art galleries around the world, and I’ve never been to one like that, where it’s just spaced out between different locations. You go on your own adventure.”

Among the show’s sets in Vancouver, Sweeny is partial to one he finds most reminiscent of the Pittsburgh he grew up in.

“More so than the (modern) hospital (set), the clinic features a lot of design elements that you would think of as old Pittsburgh,” Sweeny said. “The brick, stained-glass windows.”

Eagle-eyed viewers might notice during scenes in the Holmes Clinic bullpen a nod to a specific bit of Pittsburgh behind the staircase that leads up to Watson’s office.

“There’s a large metal wall that’s perforated with little holes that is taken very directly from the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh,” Sweeny said. “Before shooting in Pittsburgh, we did two scouting trips (to the city) and had a location scout showing us all over the place,” where they spotted that design element behind the MuseumLab admissions desk and decided to use something similar in the “Watson” set.

A glimpse around Watson’s Holmes Clinic office reveals diplomas on the wall from CMU (where Watson went for undergrad) and Pitt (where Watson attended medical school). The exterior of Watson’s apartment was among the second unit shots Sweeny’s team captured: Watson lives above Penn Mac in the Strip District.

In the “Watson” production office, one wall is dominated by photos that juxtapose images from Pittsburgh in one vertical column with images from Vancouver in the next vertical column, showing possible local substitutes, including bridges, buildings and sports arenas.

Production designer Dustin Farrell (“Riverdale,” “Deadly Class”) said many American TV shows film in Vancouver doubling for Seattle, San Francisco and New York City. It’s trickier to double a place like Pittsburgh.

“Pittsburgh has very unique architecture when it comes to the districts where you have just endless rowhouses,” Farrell said. “I don’t know if there’s many comparable cities with that and those houses with aluminum (siding). Not fancy rowhouses, middle class. That is the trickiest thing to find. I was just talking to locations about it two weeks ago, and I was like, it’s the one thing that has truly eluded us this season, and I’m desperate to find. That’s our white whale.”

While filming in Pittsburgh last June, the “Watson” crew noticed an oddity that may even elude locals.

“Every fire hydrant is different, and it’s painted a different color, a different shape,” Farrell said. “We started going down a rabbit hole, and it turns out Pittsburgh has a history of fire hydrants, because with the steel manufacturing they have all these different fire hydrants from different eras. They all have different names — nicknames like ‘the fat boy’ and ‘the skinny boy’ and whatnot — and the neighborhoods paint them as they see fit.”

Farrell’s team sculpted foam versions of several different Pittsburgh fire hydrants, painted them different colors and plopped them on Vancouver sidewalks so they’re visible in the background of scenes filmed on location in Canada.

“Watson” even tried to get real Mineo’s pizza boxes to use in an episode, but the boxes were accidentally sent to the wrong address. The production team had to make their own “not entirely accurate (Mineo’s) boxes,” Farrell said.

CBS ordered “Watson” straight-to-series rather than make a pilot episode and then decide whether to proceed with a full season. It’s a new approach some networks are opting for. In this case, CBS has worked with Sweeny extensively when he was a writer and showrunner on CBS’s Sherlock Holmes-themed procedural “Elementary” (2012-19) and again on “Limitless” (2015-16).

“It wasn’t something I ever thought that I would do,” Sweeny said of returning to storytelling in the Sherlock Holmes arena, “but when I had the idea, it’s just been so comfortable and fun to revisit. Additionally, when I write in the world of procedurals, I love it because if you look at the common thread connecting the procedural writing I’ve done from ‘Medium’ to ‘Elementary’ to ‘Limitless,’ I love to write about cases that exist at the very edge of human knowledge. And we had the chance to do that about all kinds of medical phenomenon.”

“Watson” also features brief appearances by a lab robot, LabGuardian 1881 (presumably named after the year Holmes and Watson met), who Watson nicknames Clyde. Clyde is also the name of Sweeny’s pet turtle, who appeared as Holmes’ pet on “Elementary.” (“He’s been my pet for 10 years now,” Sweeny said. “Clyde will outlive us all.”)

Sweeny said “Watson’s” consultant, executive producer and “medical god­father” is a geneticist, Sharon Moalem.

“I have a personal interest in that topic, and we are able to really write about the vanguard of medicine in a way that hopefully is fun and entertaining,” Sweeny said, “but also that you can watch our episodes and come away learning a little bit more about yourself and your genes.”

And then there’s the Sherlock of it all. Sweeny said he was particularly intrigued to explore Holmes’ impact on Watson’s life.

“Imagine saying, ‘Yeah, I met this guy and he looked at my watch and he told me some things about myself and now I’m going to move in with him and we’re going to solve mysteries together,’ ” Sweeny said. “It’s quite a strange thing. The chance to dig into that was what really appealed to me about the premise. Watson is now dealing with the aftermath of that choice.”

Watson put his life, his wife (Rochelle Aytes) and his medical practice in Pittsburgh on hold while he gallivanted around England and Europe with Holmes.

“He’s brought new skills back, but he’s also done a lot of damage,” Sweeny said. “We’re going to see him try to fit back in despite being an entirely new person.”

But Watson hasn’t fully escaped his past with Holmes. While weekly medical mysteries make up the procedural element of “Watson,” there’s a running serialized story about Holmes’ nemesis, Moriarty, who continues to quietly plot against Watson.

Sweeny attempted to get shows set in Pittsburgh on TV in the past — one script that never got filmed followed a “grown-up version of Encyclopedia Brown who’d come back home to Squirrel Hill,” Sweeny said — but “Watson” is his first Pittsburgh-­set show to make it to series.

“As much as any show of mine, this one is pretty autobiographical,” Sweeny said. “Oakland was my stomping ground. When I was a kid, I went to the Carlow campus school and my mother worked, first at the Carnegie Museums and then at UPMC when it was called Presby.”

Sweeny said his mother, Maureen Sweeny, was the chief administrator of the organ transplant department at UPMC in the ’80s and ’90s.

“That was when the science of human organ transplantation was really being refined and becoming more routine because of the anti-rejection drugs that were advancing the possibilities there,” Sweeny said. “She instilled in me and in my brother this respect for science. … and I always had the sense that the highest and best thing you could do was to be a doctor, not just because it would get you a nice house but because you’d be helping people and advancing what’s possible.”

While Sweeny’s vocational interests took him in another direction, he’s glad that “Watson” allows him to circle back to his Pittsburgh roots.

“(My mother) has been gone for about 12 years, but it’s a chance to connect with her even so,” Sweeny said. “I think she would have gotten an enormous kick out of what we’re doing with this show, and that means a whole hell of a lot to me.”