Stream It Or Skip It?

We forgot why we didn’t like the Fox hit Doc when it premiered in January, so we reread our review (which we do often; this is what happens when you write about 500 or so reviews per year). We weren’t sure if the concept that Dr. Amy Larsen, played by Molly Parker, can go back to her old job after having the previous eight years of her life wiped out by a car accident was going to hold up in the long term. But as the show enters its second season, Amy is still dealing with all of the life confusion that comes with having such a big portion of her life missing.

DOC SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: At Westside Hospital in Minneapolis, police and SWAT teams arrive, a surgeon runs to a room where “one of ours” is bleeding out, and Dr. Gina Walker (Amirah Vann) asks the hospital administrator, Dr. Michael Hamda (Omar Metwally), “What’s going on?”

The Gist: Six hours earlier, we see Dr. Amy Larsen (Molly Parker) trying to get in touch with Dr. Jake Heller (Jon-Michael Ecker), with whom she’s trying to rebuild a relationship despite the fact that Jake saw her and Michael kissing. After an auto accident, Amy’s memories from 2016 to 2024 have been wiped out, and in her mind she’s still married to Michael, despite the fact that he’s remarried and about to have a baby with his new wife Nora (Sarah Allen).

Since coming back to work after her accident, Amy has gone from head of internal medicine back to being an intern due to her memory loss. But she’s also a more compassionate doctor, something she was before her young son died and she threw herself into her career, costing her that compassion plus her marriage and her relationship with her daughter Katie (Charlotte Fountain-Jardim); ironically, the injury has helped her rebuild with both of them.

Amy treats a young woman who is in line for a heart transplant, but when she and Dr. TJ Coleman (Patrick Walker) see a spot on her lung, it puts the transplant in jeopardy. When the woman’s dad, who’s a cop, sees that Amy is treating her, his anger knows no bounds. She doesn’t remember her history with this case, and we see flashbacks to six years prior, when she advised the father not to do the transplant — she knew the woman had an aortic anomaly that would put her life in jeopardy, but she told the father that treatments would be less risky.

The father is so distraught that he pulls his gun out on the floor, and TJ gets shot in the femoral artery when he tries to wrestle it away. As TJ is whisked away for surgery, the father holds Amy, Dr. Sonya Maitra (Anya Banerjee) and Nurse Julie (Claire Armstrong) hostage. At the same time, Nora goes into labor seven weeks early, and Michael tries to deal with the hostage situation and his wife’s labor while trying to assure Katie that Amy is doing OK.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Like the just-returned Brilliant Minds, Doc has lots in common with House. It’s also based on the Italian series Doc – Nelle tue mani.

Our Take: Where Doc makes the most sense is when it explores everything going on with Amy’s attempts at piecing together her life and career after eight years of her life disappears from her memory. There are lots of implications there, and , creator Barbie Kligman has done a good job of showing how Amy still struggles with all of it. The fact that she’s even practicing medicine four months after the accident is miraculous, but we can see that Amy desperately wants to be whole again, because so much happened during this missing chunk of her life.

The story about the woman who needs the new heart works on one level, because Amy has to deal with the consequences of her seemingly clinically-cold advice to her father six years prior, despite the fact that she doesn’t remember anything about it. But it doesn’t work on the basic medical drama level because, well, it feels like something we saw done on other medical shows a lot more convincingly.

But if that’s not enough, for some reason Kligman and company have to have Michael’s new wife go into early labor, and have him deal with that and the hostage situation at the same time. Boy, there’s only so much one man can handle, know what we mean? It just makes the episode even more ridiculous than it already was, to the point where it makes a typical episode of Grey’s Anatomy look like gritty reality.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: After telling Gina that she’s ready to go into the sensory deprivation tank Gina offers as a therapy to help recover memories, we see Amy in the tank, with the lid being lowered.

Sleeper Star: Starting in the second episode, Felicity Huffman joins the cast as a mentor of Amy’s who we suspect will join the staff at Westside.

Most Pilot-y Line: As if the episode’s plot wasn’t complicated enough, there’s a scene where Jake needs to convince the parents of the heart’s donor to actually donate his organs. At least he gets to use the “Chai” pendant he wears to tell them about a Talmudic axiom he learned from his rabbi as he prepped for his bar mitzvah.

Our Call: STREAM IT. As much as we just roll our eyes at the standard medical drama stuff, we do enjoy Molly Parker’s lead performance in Doc and the more we see her trying to piece the missing chunk of her life together, the better the show will be in Season 2.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.