‘Doc’ Review: Fox’s Drama About an Amnesiac Doctor Is All Too Forgettable
As titles go, Doc is as straightforward as they get. It’s simple, inoffensive, not trying at all to be cutesy or clever. It’s accurate in that the Fox drama is indeed about a doctor, though I don’t think anyone ever actually refers to Molly Parker’s Amy Larsen as “Doc.” And it’s so bland you’re probably going to forget it even as you’re reading this paragraph.
The actual show is at least more memorable than that, but only slightly. It’s a painless watch, brisk enough to keep from being boring and slick enough to never become too frustrating. But it’s also rarely bold or exciting enough to leave a lasting impression. Aimed right down the middle, it hits its target perhaps too well.
The premise, and its lead actress, probably deserve better. Adapted by Barbie Kligman from an Italian drama that was, in turn, inspired by a true story, Doc begins in an intriguingly soapy place. The Amy we first meet is a chief of internal medicine known as much for her prickliness as her brilliance. Then, 15 minutes into the premiere, she suffers a brain injury that wipes the last eight years from her memory. The Amy who comes to is the sweeter, warmer woman she was in 2016, before the profound tragedy that turned her so brittle. Parker plays the new Amy with a disarming openness that stands in stark contrast to the pained and angry person we see in occasional flashbacks.
There is probably a version of this story that centers on the grief and confusion Amy might feel about losing nearly a decade of her life. Doc is not that narrative. Sure, the memory loss comes with complications. She wakes up still in love with her boss, Michael (Omar Metwally), since she doesn’t remember divorcing him four years ago, while her more recent beau, chief resident Jake (Jon Ecker), pines silently from the sidelines. The hospital allows her to return to work only in a role akin to a med student’s, and even that just after a lot of arguing and maneuvering. (There’s also some nonsense involving a secret that could destroy the career of her professional rival, played by Scott Wolf, but since it goes nowhere interesting, forget I even mentioned it.)
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Mostly, though, Amy’s amnesia turns out to be a blessing in disguise, allowing her to move forward without the baggage of her recent past. It’s apparently easier to mend a relationship with her semi-estranged daughter (Charlotte Fountain-Jardim’s Katie) or win over a workplace nemesis (Anya Banerjee’s Sonya) when Amy doesn’t remember any bad blood to begin with and no one can reasonably hold her accountable for actions she doesn’t even recall. Besides, just about everybody — even her neuropsychiatrist best friend Gina (Amirah Vann, infusing personality into an underwritten role) — seems to agree that this Amy is an improvement, to the point that they invoke the “old” Amy only as a criticism.
But the fantasy of that clean slate would probably hit harder if any of the people around Amy felt like, well, people. Despite multiple storylines built around the idea that you never really know what someone else is going through, Doc shows only limited curiosity about who its supporting characters are outside of Amy. To the end of the 10-episode season, Jake is not much more than just the guy who’s in love with Amy, and Gina not much more than her supportive pal; Katie is treated less as an adolescent working through her own conflicted feelings than as a reward for Amy’s good behavior. Not that Amy herself is allowed much room to be complicated, either, since the messier and less palatable version of her was erased along with her memories.
The flatness extends to the case-of-the-week storylines. Especially in the first half of the season, the medical mystery plots are so predictable as to feel perfunctory; you can practically set your watch by the moment at which a seemingly recovering patient takes a sudden turn for the worse.
To its credit, Doc is more adept at crafting moral dilemmas that force its characters to reckon with the cost of saving one child at the expense of another’s health, or a patient’s right to know a secret that could destroy his family. But it doesn’t have the will to take them anywhere truly surprising or ambitious. A poor mother refusing life-saving care because she fears Child Services will take her daughter is an opportunity for a doctor to do a good deed, not for the show to comment on the shameful state of the American healthcare system and our failing social safety net.
My favorite case was the one that fell the furthest outside Doc’s usual wheelhouse. A young man (Nicholas Podany) comes in complaining of vertigo, but it’s not his diagnosis that has the staff captivated; it’s the fact that he’s living out a real-life love triangle, to the delight of two nurses (Conni Miu and Claire Armstrong) who comment on every rom-com trope along the way. By the standards of our post-Deadpool era, this minor bit of self-aware humor is nothing radical. But within the confines of this staid drama, it feels like a breath of fresh air. It flaunts a playful sense of humor, a real sense of chemistry between the nurses, and an understanding that the world could be bigger than just Amy. It has, in short, what most of the series doesn’t: a personality.
