‘Royal Pains’ season 8, episode 7 reaction (exclusive): Show exec explains musical choice

You’ve now had a chance to check out this weekend’s new episode of “Royal Pains,” and the great news here is that “The Good News Is…” turned out to be a lot of fun. You learned a great deal when it comes to Paige and Evan’s future, and to go along with that, some other characters seem set up rather well.

Of course, what we imagine many people are probably talking about the most right now are some of the songs, which came about thanks to hallucinations that Hank’s patient Annette (Cloris Leachman) was having over the course of the hour. These hallucinations led to the reappearance of many familiar faces, and also a chance for the main cast to show off some of their own singing voices.

In explaining further how they were able to make this convention work for the episode. executive producer Michael Rauch told us the following earlier today:

“The biggest thing for us was finding a way to make the music feel organic, so that way it didn’t feel like we were doing a musical out of self-indulgence. Coming up with the medical condition that Cloris Leachman has, which is an authentic condition in which you see and hear things musically, [was the first step]. When that came, and we got help from Jeff Drayer, who is both a medical consultant and a writer on the staff, all of a sudden it felt like it was really organic to setting up songs, and making sure that Cloris Leachman’s character was in the room every time the characters broke into song, whether it [was revealed] before or after the song, so the songs felt justified in terms of storytelling.

“We realized very early that when you are making a show in New York that half of your guest cast are Broadway stars, so we had this incredible list, everyone from Christine Ebersole to Patti Murin to Alexandra Socha, Michael Mulheren, Laura Benanti, Cheyenne Jackson, all of these people who have starred on Broadway shows who have been on the show. We had talked for a long time about having Easter eggs in the final season, bringing characters and props back for our most loyal fans to see. It felt like this was an incredible way to get all of these talented guest stars back, not to mention our great main cast in Mark [Feuerstein], Paulo [Costanzo], and Reshma [Shetty] and Brooke [D’Orsay] and Ben [Shenkman] and Henry Winkler. It just felt like the perfect opportunity”

We’re going to have more from Rauch and executive producer / co-creator Andrew Lenchewski over the coming days about the series finale, so be on the lookout for that.