What if you had the chance to forget every bad thing that happened to you in the last decade?
Would forgetting life’s cruelest and deepest cuts reset the button on your own rough exterior? Would you be happier? Softer? Better able to navigate your life and the people in it without the painful memories of betrayal, or disappointment, or grief preempting your reactions?
Would it make you a better person?
That’s the question posed in FOX’s new medical drama Doc about to hit our screens this week.
The new series stars Molly Parker (Lost in Space, House of Cards) as Dr. Amy Larsen, the Chief of Internal Medicine at a local hospital where she rules with an iron rod. Amy is brilliant, piercing, and results-focused, but also arrogant, condescending, and at times borderline cruel.
On the day we first meet her, we see that Dr. Amy is looking for patient autopsy evidence with which to fire another doctor (in fairness he totally deserves it), is having a secret fling with a younger doctor, and isn’t able to persuade her estranged daughter to call her back on the phone. We see her verbally cut a young pregnant patient down to size, and dole out the same acerbic comments to the staff around her. The staff at this particular TV hospital don’t just dislike Dr. Amy; they fear her.
But the interns and doctors and receptionist staff aren’t the only ones having a bad day. Amy is about to have one of her own. While texting and driving, Amy’s car hits a truck and overturns, causing our protagonist to suffer a catastrophic brain injury.
When Amy awakes several days later she learns that she has partial retrograde amnesia. Specifically, she has no memory of most of the last decade of her life. Amy wonders why her family — consisting of her loving and devoted husband (Omar Metwally) and two beautiful children seen in somewhat soapy sepia-toned flashbacks — aren’t exactly rallying around her bedside. As it turns out, Amy divorced her husband (who is now the Chief Medical Officer at the same hospital) four years previously, after her youngest child died at just 7 years old.
To make matters worse the dodgy doc Amy tried to have fired is now her boss, which would be ok as Amy doesn’t remember plotting to have him fired, if it weren’t for the fact he is now in a position and mood to have Amy ousted instead. Not only that, but Amy’s secret lover is reluctant to tell her about their relationship, and instead chooses to maintain a coolly professional demeanour around her under the new circumstances. Is he simply pining from the sidelines? It’s hard to know!
Reeling from the grief of losing her child all over again, and with no memory of ever wanting to divorce her stalwart husband, Amy is compelled to chart a new path forward by returning to the profession that gave her life meaning.
However this Amy is warm-hearted, empathic, caring, and deeply interested in the lives of both the patients and the staff around her, a total antithesis to the woman they know. Do they rally around and support this newly turned-over leaf? They do not.
Although every inch a broadcast medical drama with cases of the week that initially stump our docs before they happen upon the best course of treatment, there is something refreshing in Doc’s hook. It’s been years since we’ve seen a medical drama where the interns and attending aren’t all acting as a cohesive and dedicated team of do-gooders. Amy has enemies everywhere, from the jealous Dr. Sonya (Anya Banerjee) who clearly has a thing for Amy’s hot secret boyfriend Dr. Jake (Jon Ecker), to her new boss, Dr. Richard (Scott Wolf), to those who are simply looking for any excuse to ditch the HBIC.
Additionally, the show poses an interesting question about how our ability to change is based on the things that give us the most meaning. In Amy’s forgotten history, she threw herself into work and became estranged from her family in an ill-advised attempt to hide from the pain of the loss of her son. After almost a decade she succeeded. Now once again, Amy faces the same pain as if for the first time while battling for her right to return to work.
Will she choose differently this time?
Doc stars Molly Parker as Dr. Amy Larsen, Omar Metwally as Dr. Michael Hamda, Amirah Vann as Dr. Gina Walker, Jon Ecker as Dr. Jake Heller, Anya Banerjee as Dr. Sonya Maitra, Scott Wolf as Dr. Richard Miller, Patrick Walker as Dr. Theodore ‘TJ’ Coleman, and Charlotte Fountain-Jardim as Katie Hamda.
The premiere episode “If at First You Don’t Succeed…” airs Tuesday, Jan. 7 (9:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX.
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