Quick Talk With Ken Jeong

Some of your best-known characters are pretty terrible people– Aww, thank you!

What’s it like playing a family man?

It’s a nice departure from crazy. I get to draw directly on my own background as a father of two daughters and being married for 11 years. What I like about it is that I can still reference my comedic persona that I’ve cultivated over the past few years and channel that into a more grounded character.

Is this the first role you can actually watch with your kids?

What’s great is they come to some tapings of the show. My girls are 8 years old–they’re fraternal twins–and to see them laugh at my character’s son’s jokes is pretty fulfilling.

You were a real-life doctor before you got into acting full-time. What do medical shows get wrong that bugs you the most?

I honestly never watched a lot of medical shows, because the better they were, the more realistic they were. Twenty years ago, when ER first premiered, it was so good, but I had to stop watching, because it felt like I was watching work in medical school.

Dr. Ken is the rare medical show not set in a hospital. Is there humor to be found in our health care system?

I worked at an HMO for seven years and definitely have been trying to satirize the tropes of being in managed care. Bad doctors, which I honestly rarely see, sometimes can be less incentivized to work hard because they’re just on salary. What if Dr. Ken realized that and takes an hour between each patient? He doesn’t do it badly–he just socializes a lot more or watches Funny or Die videos.