'The Resident' showrunner unpacks Tuesday's powerful episode that tracks the impact of a single bullet on a hospital — and reveals the real-life inspiration behind the story

• Warning: Spoilers ahead for "One Bullet," Tuesday's episode of "The Resident."
• The medical drama's coshowrunner spoke to Insider about the inspiration behind the episode.

A few months ago, Andrew Chapman, coshowrunner and executive producer of Fox's "The Resident," got a call from one of his writers, who also works as an ER doctor in Boston. (In accordance with HIPAA, Insider will not reveal the doctor's name). He told Chapman that a young patient of his had just died. They found a gun in the patient's home and "for no discernible reason," that person had tried to kill themselves, Chapman recalled.

"And the damage that this person inflicted on themselves with the gun, a single bullet, was horrific. And it took hours, and hours, and hours trying to save this person's life," Chapman said. Ultimately, the Boston hospital's medical staff couldn't save them.

Chapman's writer called him up "in tears," the coshowrunner told Insider. He said that the "psychological" and "emotional" toll the impact of that one bullet had on healthcare workers was "so profound" that some of them had to go home for the day.

After hearing the story, Chapman and "The Resident" creator and coshowrunner Amy Holden Jones knew they had to translate it onto the small screen for their show somehow. The result is Tuesday's episode "One Bullet," a powerful hour of television in which viewers follow Conrad (Matt Czuchry) and the rest of the Chastain Park Memorial staff as they try to save a gunshot wound victim.

The political element of gun violence was not meant to be the main point of the episode, Chapman says

The staff of the show knew their story could potentially have a political angle, given the ongoing fight for stricter gun control laws. But Chapman said the episode was purposefully not "political."

"It's not about whether you have the right to own a gun. It's not about the second amendment," he said, noting that politics is never mentioned throughout the episode. "All we want to do is say, guns exist, bullets exist, and bullets enter into human beings, and this is what happens when a bullet enters into a human being."

Men who own handguns are eight times more likely to die of self-inflicted gunshot wounds than those who don't, and women who own handguns are 35 times more likely to die of self-inflicted gunshot wounds than those who don't, according to a 2020 Stanford University study on handgun ownership.

"This is what happens to the hospital," he continued. "This is what happens to the doctors."

The patient viewers follow on "One Bullet" is a John Doe who the doctors rename Eucalyptus (they go through the alphabet and name unidentified GSW victims after plants). But to raise the emotional stakes of the gunshot and demonstrate the immense, personal impact of the bullet throughout the hospital, Chapman also set the birth of Padma (Anuja Joshi) and A.J.'s (Malcolm Jamal Warner) twins on the episode. A counter on-screen even keeps track of how many healthcare workers' days are impacted by one bullet, updating throughout the hour.

Chapman called it almost "metaphoric" that viewers get to see lives brought into the world while the doctors desperately try to keep one from leaving it. But the resources and staff use to try and save Eucalyptus send the hospital into chaos and potentially threaten Padma and her babies' lives.

Unlike the victim of the aforementioned real-life tragedy that inspired the episode, Eucalyptus survives by the end of "One Bullet," as do Padma and her newborns.

Chapman said that the decision to have the victim survive was made because "The Resident" writing team thought the story would be more compelling if Eucalyptus survived, but viewers still didn't know his name — only that he "is paralyzed, and that person's going to survive but their life is going to be wrecked."

"Nobody keeps track of how many people are shot and then released. Released to have perfectly normal lives, or released to have lives that are completely upended by a single bullet. And that kind of blows my mind," Chapman said.

"We don't, as a society, track the damage," he added. "We track the ultimate damage, the death, but we don't track the lesser damage, which sometimes can be worse."

"The Resident" airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.