Fox's Best Medicine has some unpleasant side effects

The commercials that make Fox’s Best Medicine look like a modern twist on Northern Exposure sell this new dramedy as a pleasant winter diversion, a chance to laugh and learn with some quirky characters who remind viewers of people they know or hope to meet someday. Add the involvement of TV vets like Josh Charles, Abigail Spencer, and Annie Potts, as well as a concept that has connected with folks around the world, and this seems like the increasingly rare promising hour-long network show. But unfortunately, Best Medicine is a stark disappointment that lacks personality.

ITV’s Doc Martin ran for ten seasons from 2004 to 2022 to the delight of fans around the world. And its concept was wonderfully pliable: A vascular surgeon named Dr. Martin (Martin Clunes in the original) is forced to move to the small town where he spent his childhood holidays after developing a crippling fear of blood. The big-city doctor dealing with small-town eccentricities is so easily translatable into other cultures that versions of Doc Martin have aired in the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. Honestly, it’s a bit surprising that it took this long for the United States to tackle it.

Josh Charles, a well-deserved Emmy nominee for The Good Wife and TV staple all the way back to Sports Night in the late ’90s, steps into the shined shoes of Doc Martin for this American take. The actor is great at playing guys who try to swallow their emotions but allow just enough to be seen in their eyes or heard in their cadence. He should, in other words, fit this part perfectly. And partnering him with Abigail Spencer also seems like a smart casting decision. A soap-opera breakout, she too has shined on TV, most notably in the excellent SundanceTV drama Rectify and the canceled-too-soon Timeless. And like Charles, she also has a skill with subtlety that the writers of Best Medicine rarely utilize.

In the show, Charles’ uptight Dr. Martin Best returns to the fictional Port Wenn, Maine, where the Boston-based doc summered with his aunt Joan (an effective but underused Potts). From the minute he walks into his gorgeous office, Dr. Best is startled by the outsized personalities around him, including assistant Elaine (Cree), who is more interested in her online personality than helping patients, and gregarious sheriff Mark (Josh Segarra), who is smarting over the recently-ended engagement to the charming Louisa (Spencer). 

Before you know it, unpredictable cases are crossing Doc Martin’s reluctant desk, starting with a local who has grown man boobs. Yes, that’s the level of the humor on this show. The first two episodes alone feature the aforementioned male mammaries, Mark looking for Viagra so he can sleep around, and the town being overrun with diarrhea just before the monthly baked-beans dinner. It’s not exactly the height of great wit; and these aren’t the kind of cases that made House a hit.  

Of course, they don’t have to be to work. No one minds well-done comfort-food TV, but that’s actually where this show goes depressingly limp. These characters aren’t even quirky enough. They’d be more entertaining if they were broad caricatures. So little registers around the fringes of Best Medicine that one starts to miss the exaggerated personalities of the Hallmark Channel movies that this begins to resemble, right down to its flighty score. While it’s not fair to compare everything to Northern Exposure, that series worked so well because it treated life in a small town with respect and care when it came to character. There’s been little work put into making Port Wenn feel like a three-dimensional place populated with real people.

That said, Charles and Spencer find brief moments of depth. It’s not until well into the second episode that they get an extended scene together, but they hint at what this show could be with stronger writing. Not only do they have chemistry, but they also reveal how much they can do with just a bit of backstory as Martin talks about his past in a way that finally feels real. In the third episode, Louisa is concerned about not having any female friends; and while it’s a truly sitcomish premise, Spencer finds a way to make that awkwardness likable. 

The weirdest thing about Best Medicine is that one would expect it to falter due to overwriting, as Hollywood has a habit of turning small-town residents into caricatures. But this show could actually use a dose of quirk. As is, it’s just a copy of a copy, a prescription without a legible signature.   

Brian Tallerico is a contributor to The A.V. Club. Best Medicine premieres January 4 on Fox.    

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