Conan O'Brien is producing a Fox comedy called Bob's New Heart Show, about a guy named Bob and his new heart

By Sean O'Neal | January 2, 2013 | 8:42pm

Aux Features TV

While the frosty receptions for Emily Owens M.D. and The Mob Doctor seemed to suggest that the viewing audience has had it with TV shows treating the medical profession as a backdrop for their chicanery and flimflams—particularly the viewing audience composed of stern, 19th-century schoolmarms—Fox, for one, clearly still believes that laughter is the best medicine, even more so than actual medicine. It's just ordered a new single-camera sitcom from Community/The Good Guys writer Ben Wexler and Conan O'Brien's Conaco production company, about a big-city doctor who has a life-altering heart transplant—a literal change of heart—that causes him to move back to his "working-class" hometown and launch a small family practice, then yuk it up instead of taking disease seriously.

Unlike its fellow Doc Hollywood descendant, The CW's Hart Of Dixie, the show doesn't go in for obvious puns by actually naming its doctor "Hart," then calling itself Change Of Hart, or Home Is Where The Hart Is, or even Hart To Heart: Not The Detective Show, But The One Where The Guy Named Hart Gets A New Heart And Goes To His Hometown That Is Also Named Heart, probably because Hart Of Dixie already ruined that. It does, however, somehow have an even more awkward title: Bob's New Heart Show, a bit of obvious wordplay on The Bob Newhart Show that suggests the entire series was conceived while getting really high and watching TV Land, and that we dodged a bullet that The Dick Van Dyke Show wasn't on. Anyway, it hasn't even produced a pilot yet, but hopefully Bob's New Heart Show will end with Bob waking to find his old heart on the pillow next to him.