Exclusive | How ‘Best Medicine’ transformed quaint New York towns into Maine

Fresh Maine lobster, straight from New York. 

In the new Fox comedy “Best Medicine,” which showrunner Liz Tuccillo described as “House” meets “Gilmore Girls,” the curmudgeonly Dr. Martin Best (Josh Charles) moves from Boston to be the general practitioner in a quaint Maine fishing village called Port Wenn. 

“Best Medicine” premieres Tuesday, Jan. 6 (8 p.m. on Fox), and the town is filled with quirky characters played by Annie Potts, Abigail Spencer, and Josh Segarra. It’s all based on the British show, “Doc Martin.” 

But, the cast didn’t have to relocate to remote Maine – it was all filmed in New York. 

“I was spending time in Maine with friends during Covid,” Tuccillo told The Post. “I wanted to put it in a place that was not just a small, cozy small town, but also had an industry attached to it and a livelihood and a lifestyle. I liked the idea of being in a fishing community.”

Since Maine is so remote and has “no television infrastructure,” it didn’t make sense to film there. Instead, Tuccillo and the “Best Medicine” team found some quaint Hudson Valley towns about ninety minutes outside of Manhattan that could be transformed into Maine onscreen, including New Hamburg, Cornwall, Beacon, and Hudson. 

Although the locations make the show scenic, they also made for some amusing misadventures for the cast. 

Segarra told The Post that when they were filming in Cornwall, “there is a train that goes by probably every eight minutes. So, we will be in the middle of a scene. And here comes that beautiful train!” 

He described the train as, “one of those long ones. You’re sitting there for about ten minutes,” waiting for it to pass, which interrupted a scene. “We had one that I felt like it took an hour.”

The “Other Two” actor joked that since it was such a part of the filming experience, he wanted “to make sure that we put that train in the show!”

 Martin’s home / office was on a soundstage, but otherwise, the production used buildings such as real homes, or an old barn in Cornwall for on-location shoots.

They used shots of the Hudson River to stand in for the harbor in their Maine town.

“The idea is that the town is on a cove. So it’s sort of like this feeling of a bay, an inlet that goes out into the ocean. We were able to use the river because it gave the feeling of the cove,” said Tuccillo, who also used to write on “Sex and the City.” 

Just because the show wasn’t in the Big Apple, however, that doesn’t mean it was immune to New York style goings-on. 

For instance, Spencer told The Post, “I’ve never been hit on so much!”

She recalled an incident when she was buying wine, and a man in the wine shop “ran after” her when she left. He asked what wine she bought before asking, “Do you want to share that?’”

She recalled that there have been “other stories” along those lines.

“I was like, ‘Oh wow, this is bold.’ It was just so funny. I was like, ‘Wow. I guess this is what people do in small towns. They notice you don’t have a ring on that finger, lady!’” 

The former “Suits” actress recalled another incident when she was out with Charles and Segarra — and they walked past a “murder crime scene” with caution tape.

“And we were kind of making light of it,” she said, because they assumed that murder wouldn’t happen in a quaint small town. 

But, when they checked the news the following day, “it was a murder. And we were like, ‘Oh my God!’”  

So, during her time filming in quaint Hudson Valley towns, she quipped, “I get hit on, or, there might be murder.”