As SkyMed returns for its highly anticipated fourth season, the homegrown Canadian drama continues to soar to new heights as a Paramount+ exclusive. To celebrate the release of Season 4, Kavita Musty sat down with actor Mercedes Morris, who has portrayed the driven and fearless Lexi since season one. She also sat down with producer Vanessa Piazza, whose company, Piazza Entertainment, helped bring the ambitious series to life. From filming in brutal Canadian winters to building an authentic world inspired by real-life air ambulance crews, the conversations explore the evolution of SkyMed, the challenges behind the scenes, and why audiences continue to connect with the show’s unique blend of heart, drama, and high-stakes storytelling. Article by: Shwayta Sharma.

From Canadian Drama to Global Paramount+ Success:

Mercedes Morris on Growing With Lexi

Kavita Musty: SkyMed is a homegrown show. It’s a Canadian drama series. And now it’s a 4 season paramount plus exclusive. And you, Mercedes, and your character Lexi have been here from the beginning!

Mercedes Morris: I have! I’ve been here since day one, on set! Season one was in Winnipeg or Windy Peg, as the locals call it. It was so cold. It’s freezing, I’ll never forget what it was like. You kind of need that sometimes, those crazy environments and weather. Those extremes help with the stakes of the show. When we’re filming, and we’re cold, and we’re rescuing someone in the snow. I’m really cold, and the stakes just get higher!

Vanessa Piazza on Scaling an Ambitious Production

Kavita: Congratulations on four seasons! It’s pretty amazing for it to be a Canadian scripted drama. It started off as a small Canadian show, and now you’re a four-season Paramount+ exclusive! I’d love to know what’s been your biggest challenge in this whole journey?

Vanessa Piazza: I think the biggest challenge with SkyMed has always been the size and scope of the show. As well as making sure that we can have a super high production value with the budget that we have. I think it’s just a very ambitious show. It always has been. There are a lot of moving parts. So, I think every season, it’s always been about pushing to just make sure we can squeeze every dollar out of the budget and get it on screen. It’s a combination of Paramount support and our license fees, plus government funding, and grant money from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund, which has been really helpful. Putting all those pieces together, it’s a really large show, and we have to stick to a certain number of days of shooting.

We just had to get really creative. We do a lot of stuff in units, which kind of helps us be able to have more days of actual shooting without actually changing our calendar days. We do two units on one day. It takes an amazing crew to be able to successfully pull it off.

So we’ve been super lucky that way. A lot of the crew have been with us for the entire series, or have been with me for several other series. It’s a great group of people, and it takes everyone to sort of pull that together. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges. Shooting in a distant location for just logistics reasons, it can get very hard. We’ve had great support from North Bay, the Province of Manitoba. It takes a village

Bringing Authenticity to the World of Air Ambulances:

Mercedes Morris on Lexi’s Responsibility and Pressure

Kavita: This season, Lexi is stepping into the captaincy, and it’s SkyMed. So the MO is, you are going to be pushed against the wall, up in a corner, and you’re going to have to make some life-or-death calls. How do you get into that headspace of carrying the weight of that situation? Are there specific tools that you use?

Mercedes: I think a lot of it comes down to Lexi’s backstory. I take her integrity as a person very seriously, because she knows about being not only a woman, but also a Black woman. There aren’t many of her in this aviation industry, so there’s this level of excellence that she feels she has to deliver. She can’t be making mistakes.

Her history puts me in an initial starting place. I do tend to pull sometimes from personal experiences in order to really tap into that extra level of truth. But I feel like I also just know Lexi so well at this point. I can kind of just drop into it. I feel like we’re one.

Vanessa Piazza on Real-Life Inspirations and Medical Accuracy

Kavita: I heard that the show was inspired by the creator, Julie Pucker and her sister and brother-in-law, who met while flying air ambulances. Now that we’re in season four, how much of the narrative is kind of still shaped by real stories? Were they ever in the writer’s room? Are they still there?

Vanessa: Julie is the sole creator. She brought the series to me, so my company, ‘Piazza Entertainment’. The story of the show was inspired by her sister and brother-in-law meeting in Thompson, where they did their pilot nursing hours. They’ve continued to consult on the show. Jamie (Julie’s Brother-in-Law) has been one of our aviation consultants, and Sarah (Julie’s Sister) has come out before and shown support to the show. I think Julie’s probably often tapping their brains for something. We have tons of consultants. We have another EMT consultant based out of Manitoba, Steve Bradley. Not just Julie, but the entire writer’s room gets some of their stories from our consultants. We have medical consultants who are on set with us, every day that we’re shooting in order to make sure that the medicine is actually accurate. The stories need to be very accurate. That’s one thing that’s been important. We also had aviation consultants on the ground at the time. It all comes from lots of different sources.

SkyMed is a homegrown Canadian show, and it was picked up exclusively by Paramount+ in Canada this time around. This is really huge, given where the industry is at right now.


The Evolution of Canadian Television:

Vanessa Piazza on Industry Changes and Global Distribution

Kavita: I’d love to know more about how this happened and what kind of shift you’re seeing in the industry.

Vanessa: The series was with CBC, Paramount and CBS since the genesis. Paramount Canada came into play as CBC was no longer able to. CBC has been a super support for the show, and it wouldn’t have happened without them as well, and I am super thankful for their support. Again, it takes every piece of the puzzle to get something greenlit. Paramount Canada came in for the first season, which, given the size and scope of the show, wouldn’t have been possible without that. The Canadian piece is a very important part of that. We need all the financing, so every territory helps.

Paramount Plus, coming in for worldwide distribution, is super exciting. I’m very thankful because the industry has been very hard. I think it’s hard for Canadian, American, and international producers to get anything off the ground right now. We’re even seeing the same thing in the US market. I feel very lucky for the support that Paramount keeps pouring into this series. We’re just very fortunate that they’ve been so supportive, and they’ve been an amazing partner for myself and for Piazza Entertainment. They’ve been just fantastic.

What Makes SkyMed Different From Other Medical Dramas:

Mercedes Morris on the Physical Reality of the Show

Kavita: You started filming in Winnipeg or Windypeg. And you also filmed in North Bay. Such interesting locations! Tell me something that I wouldn’t guess in a million years, just watching SkyMed from my couch.

Mercedes: Every season, we have this kind of montage. And it usually involves the entire group. We get up to something really playful. Season one, we had a water fight. Season 2, we played a game of Volleyball in the dead of winter. It was outside, and we were, as they say, in our skivvies. We were barely clothed. It was a part of the joke. We were almost challenging shirts versus skins. Those knees shivering and the teeth… that was real.

Kavita: What was the temperature?

Mercedes: We work in minus temperatures all the time. We have shot in the snowstorms. There was a minus 40 day one time in Winnipeg, and I didn’t even know it could get that low. What? So I gotta go outside? Not only go outside, but then actually film? When you watch those shows, you laugh. When it looks good, it’s all worth it. We do it just for you. Oh, I love it. It’s not giving frostbite territory. Of course, we’re well taken care of. But out there in the moment. It’s like you gotta finish the tape. We just gotta suck it up.

Vanessa Piazza on Filming Beyond the Traditional Hospital Setting

Kavita: That’s wonderful! The story definitely speaks. Obviously, there’s a fourth season because there’s so much appetite for this. There have been so many medical dramas, and SkyMed is really unique, because there’s no other show that follows air ambulance crews in northern communities. What have you explored that the genre of medical dramas really hasn’t touched on before?

Vanessa: I think one of the questions people always ask me is “Where do you film”? And I say “North Bay”. We don’t stick to a major city, but I think that’s what makes SkyMed so unique in terms of shooting and production. We are constantly trying to source locations. We need so much wilderness, and we need unique locations like a rock-faced cliff or a quarry. There’s always some sort of new piece of wilderness. I think that’s something that makes this show a little bit different from most medical procedurals that are just sort of set in a hospital. A project I did last year was based in a hospital. There’s not that much thinking you have to do in terms of logistics. You’re just at your hospital. So I think finding our locations and always being on the move. I think that’s what makes this show unique, you know, the real nature of it all.

Producer Vanessa Piazza at the SkyMed release event.

How SkyMed Has Evolved Over Four Seasons:

Mercedes Morris on Lexi’s Journey

Kavita: I want to know, in the 4 seasons that you’ve been playing Lexi, what is something that you’ve learned? How has she impacted your life and how you live it? And is there like a specific lesson that you’ve legit incorporated into your own life?

Mercedes: I think Lexi and I both have that ‘calm under pressure’ type quality. Ice in the veins type of thing. When there is an emergency, everyone gets frantic and panicked, but I know what to do. I’ve been there naturally on the show with Lexi as well. Family gatherings, when one time my little nephew was choking, and I was like Heimlich manoeuvre! I’ve got this!

Kavita: So you bleed into Lexi naturally like that.

Mercedes: I know that I’m capable, and I’m qualified. Lexi and I both have that… We’re also pretty A personality type. We follow the rules. I don’t like to break the rules. I’ll create new ones, but I don’t really like to break the rules. And I think that…again, this has to do with the sense of integrity, right? Doing what’s right. Even when it’s hard. And you’ll see that Lexi gets put in that situation a few times throughout multiple seasons. It’s when her back is really up against the wall that’s when she really shines her honour. I think she’s taught me to continue to strive for excellence. But we’ve always kind of been that way. I’ll leave you with one thing. In my character breakdown for the audition for this show, it said Lexi has always had to work twice as hard for half the credit. I resonated with that as both just a woman and as a Black woman.

From day one, there was a piece of my heart, or a piece of her heart, with me. She’s also taught me that work is important, but it’s not everything, and you have to sometimes slow down and take care of yourself and have that balance. But also just work hard, you know? So there are a lot of similarities there.

Kavita Musty with actress Mercedes Morris.

Vanessa Piazza on New Additions to Season 4

Kavita: Usually in medical dramas, as you said, they take place in a very contained location. But here we get to see so much more of the country as well that we don’t really see. I will leave you with one last question. For somebody who hasn’t seen SkyMed up until now, what’s one thing you’d want them to know?

Vanessa: I would like them to know that our amazing legacy casts are back, and we also have a whole new group of young pilots and nurses coming in this year that’ll just sort of shake things up. I think it’s gonna be a really interesting season that way, because we’re with our amazing four cast members that we all love, and then we’ve got all these new people to bring in. New casting, new storylines, so I think that should be exciting for viewers.


Why Audiences Keep Coming Back to SkyMed:

Mercedes Morris: “Be Prepared for Wholesome Energy”:

Kavita: Somebody who’s watching Season 4 for the first time, they’re just about to hit play, what is one thing they should know?

Mercedes: Hmm. Just be prepared for wholesome energy. It’s very wholesome. There are those lovely, sometimes a little cornball moments. We love a cornball. You’ll have those moments, but then you’ll also have the drama, the high stakes. We keep it kind of spicy, you know? So, just buckle up, because you’re in for a great ride here with SkyMed.

Kavita: Thanks so much, Mercedes and Vanessa. I appreciate your time, and all the very best for Season 4 from all of us at REELway!