Readers know that I have a history of unfairly
blaming Shonda Rhimes for so much of what is wrong with TV today. I doubt,
however, I'll get much argument that ever since she arrived on the scene with Grey's
Anatomy for the last twenty years medical dramas have been far more about
what happens in the bed room than the emergency room or the operating theater. This has been true with every Shondaland
series that has featured doctors in the last twenty years and it was underlying
much of what is at the center of shows such as the failed Doctor Odyssey and
a little too much of 9-1-1 for my taste. There have been some exceptions
over the last twenty years but very few successful ones.
Happily as Grey's Anatomy becomes
old enough to legally drink at Joe's this season the last year has seen a
remarkable return to form. Even as The Pitt was taking command of the
Emmys on Sunday night one of the more prominent medical dramas on network TV
had returned for its second season: Fox's Doc.
One of the more engaging mid-season
premieres the show related the story of Amy Larsen, played by that incredible
talent Molly Parker in her first lead role after two decades working in TV. In
the Pilot, Amy was in a car crash that erased the last eight years of her
memory and that covered a lot of ground. The last thing she remembered was
being a wife and a mother to two children; now she was divorced and estranged
from her daughter. She had also thrown her life into her career and as a result
had pushed everybody away from her, save her best friend and therapist Gina (Amirah
Vann) and secret boyfriend Heller (John Michael Elker). Season 1 had her husband, now the head of the
hospital, going to bat for her to work as an intern to get her medical license
back as she tried to become a doctor while trying to win back the entire staff
she isolated during this period. Most of Season 1 dealt with the damage she had
done in her personal life during the past eight years which was riveting to
watch on its own. However from the start of Season 2 we are giving a blunt
example of just how much damage the loss of her memory has done to her professional
life in the worst possible way.
When a woman came to the hospital in
need of a heart transplant Amy had no memory of what had happened. Her father,
an ex-cop, took the hospital hostage and shot TJ, one of Amy's biggest
defenders in the leg while coming close to wounding Heller, who she had gotten
into a fight with hours before. She and Sonya (Anya Banerjee) were forced at
gunpoint to treat the daughter while her husband was forced to lie to UNOS in
order to prepare a heart for transplant. Heller then had to lie to cover it. Finally
Amy was told that the daughter was always going to die and she had delayed the
transplant years earlier in order to give the father time with his daughter.
Because of her brusque behavior the father had never forgiven her putting them
in this position of desperation.
The second episode took place within
hours of the first ending and Amy is now reeling from the professional
repercussions of her actions. Sonya had filed multiple complaints against Amy
for creating a toxic work environment before the car crash and was by far the
most adversarial. There had been a certain detent due to Amy helping her with an
incident in her past but it was clearly a band-aid on a bullet wound. Now in
the aftermath of the last hours Sonya makes it very clear that this experiment
has just been catering to Amy and now as a result the people she cares about
are in danger because of it. And as
prickly a personality as she's been during the first season Sonya's not wrong.
As a result of the pilot Richard spent far more time dealing with the crisis in
the hospital then his pregnant wife and because of what he did, he is now being
told he needs to go on paternity leave early as the board figures out the
repercussions. Considering that Heller has more or less washed his hands of her
and TJ is going to be in recovery for months, Amy is rapidly running out of
friendly faces at her hospital.
And that's before one who should be
shows up. In the second episode of the season one of Amy's closest friends and colleagues,
Dr. Joan Ridley, shows up at the hospital. Joan is played by that incredible force,
Felicity Huffman, who has been just as much a force in the 21st
century on TV as Parker has been. The sole difference has been that Huffman has
worked almost exclusively in network television and has been arguably its most
consistent great performer of either gender.
For the first thirteen years on TV,
first as Dana Whitaker on Sports Night, then as Lynette on Desperate
Housewives, Huffman was magnificent at playing the sympathetic
professional, the most relatable of women in every ensemble she was a part of,
no doubt part of the reason she won an Emmy for her work on Desperate
Housewives. Starting with her work in the incredible American Crime she
has become a master of more interested flawed professionals, often guilty of a
darker prejudices. She received three consecutive Emmy nominations for her work
in that series. We saw a similar quality in her work in When They See Us in
which she played the prosecutor who convicted the Central Park Five and
remained unrepentant even after evidence came of their innocence that would
lead to their exoneration.
Now she takes on a role that reminds
me very much of the exceptional work Christine Lahti did on Chicago Hope when
she played the feminist Dr. Kathryn Austen who was determined to be chief of
surgery of that hospital and didn't care who she had to climb over to get the
job. Far too often only the fact she was a brilliant doctor gave her any
sympathy for what was a single-minded and often brusque character. Huffman's
Joan has some of those very same qualities when we first meet her, we see she's
a friend of both Amy and Michael and she claims to come with no hidden agenda.
When Richard asks her for help with the chief of staff position, she gently picks
apart his suggestions. Eventually when he comes to her to pick her she seems
surprised and then immediately comes up with ground rules as if it's been clear
she had this the whole time.
Huffman plays her as the kind of
sympathetic professional you still can't help but dislike – and during the
second episode we have good reason to think so. Throughout the first two
episodes Amy has been having flashes of memories and we've seen her have
dinners with Joan as one of them. When Amy asks her about Joan claims not to
remember. However, by the end of the episode we learn the truth. Michael came
to her begging Joan to talk to her save their marriage. Instead Joan basically
convinced Amy that the best thing for her career was to end it: "You
really don't have a choice," she tells Amy. How big a role Joan played in changing
Amy into the woman she was before the series began is unclear; what is clear is
that she feels no remorse about taking the job Amy had before her accident
without a second thought.
There are, to be sure, the usual love
triangles and potential romances on Doc as much as any other hospital
drama yet the writers never forget the patients come first. Just as prominent
in the second episode was how Amy and Gina worked together to deal with a woman
who seemed to have driven miles to deal with a distressed pregnancy – only to
learn it was hysterical and she was suffering from a tumor. We later learned
that the patient had become part of what was likely a cult and that the Sister
had come to protect her – only to leave when she learned the woman wasn't pregnant.
The episode dealt with trying to help her deal with her loss and help build a
future afterwards and was one of the few stories in the first two episodes that
ended in hope.
Doc is yet another show that demonstrates the remarkable
revival network television has been having since the 2023 strike wiped out much
of the 2023-2024 season. And like so many of them it is led by strong female
performers who are less defined by who they sleep with then who they are on the
job and at home. They are also part of a trend of having competent
professionals at the center of them rather than the endless string of
antiheroes that have been so much of even the best television during the 21st
century. In these complicated times we need shows like Doc that are
about basically decent people trying to do their best against a fractured
system and trying to do the right thing even if its hard. Both the title
character of Doc and the show itself do both of those things extremely
well and I hope more shows like this are still to come.
My score: 4.25 stars.
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