Body of Proof follows the life and career of Medical Examiner Megan Hunt, once a high-flying neurosurgeon, who now works in Philadelphia's Medical Examiner's Office after a car accident abruptly ended her neurosurgery career. As a Medical Examiner Megan applies her vast medical knowledge, keen instincts and variously charming and scalpel-like personality to the task of solving the medical mysteries of the dead and bringing the people responsible for their deaths to justice. But that's only half the show.
I love mysteries, be they criminal, medical or any other kind, but my focus as a writer has always been on strong characters. In Body of Proof I and my partner Matt Gross wanted a show that delivered both. On its surface Body of Proof is a close-ended procedural. Each week will deliver on the promise of a smart mystery ingeniously solved. But at its core, each episode is really just an excuse for us to visit Megan and the rest of our wonderful cast of characters. What do I love about Megan? She is funny and charming but also impatient and driven. She can be abrasive one moment and achingly vulnerable the next. We may not be as smart as she is, but we're not as broken as she is either. We will root for her as she takes on not only cops and killers each week but also the wreckage of her marriage and her estrangement from her young daughter Lacey. And we will experience right along with Megan her faltering early steps in what will be a series-long quest to find love, happiness and self-knowledge, a quest for which she often seems completely unequipped, but a quest on which she has an unlikely group of helpers. The dead.
Death is a fact of life. The irony is, death has brought new life to Megan Hunt. As she investigates what happened to her patients, their lives and the lessons they hold become a kind of bequest to Megan, to learn from and to apply to her own life, if she has the courage to do so. It's one thing to want to change, it's quite another to make it happen. We will enjoy watching her try.
