Let the remoistening commence.
When the director calls cut, a makeup artist scurries over to spritz Josh Charles’ face. He needs to appear clammy. Perhaps that’s not the sexiest look for a series lead, but playing Martin Best in Best Medicine requires it.
A brilliant physician, Best has developed a crippling aversion to blood. For most people, this is inconvenient; for a doctor, it’s an existential crisis. Forced to leave his post as a top surgeon in Boston, Best becomes the GP in a Maine fishing hamlet where he spent happy summers as a boy.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is the American version of the BBC’s Doc Martin. That beloved series, with 10 seasons over 18 years, starred Martin Clunes, who guests as Best’s father on Best Medicine. Annie Potts plays Best’s aunt Sarah, a lobsterwoman, and Abigail Spencer is Louisa, a teacher. The series premieres on FOX Sunday, Jan. 4, before moving to Tuesdays, and streams the next day on Hulu.
The American version follows adaptations in Spain, France, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Still, not everyone, including the star, had seen the original before signing on for this.
“Watching the British show, as much as I liked it, for me, it was hard to connect,” Charles says. “I had to find my own way into my version of this character because we’re American; we’re not making a British show. ”
The fictional Port Wenn looks real with weathered houses and vistas of a harsh sea. It’s loaded with quirky people who never harbor unexpressed thoughts. Understandably, the closed-off Best would prefer they did. Small chance. Everyone knows everything about everyone here, although such familiarity isn’t the sole purview of one-stoplight towns.
“The thing I was drawn to was the familiarity of a small town,” says Liz Tuccillo, showrunner and executive producer, who grew up with her extended family in Brooklyn. She’s the person behind some of your favorite shows: Sex and the City, Divorce, and Sweetbitter. “This is a wish-fulfillment of an easier, simpler time. I was calling it Northern Exposure meets House: Kooky people and a curmudgeonly doctor.”
For the audience, the attraction could well be the comfort of the fish-out-of-water trope, and watching the caring townsfolk slowly rekindle some spark in this emotionally dead physician. As the world explodes around us and cruelty reigns, finding an hour of comfort TV where characters care about one another is not the worst thing.
For Charles, it was a chance to try something a little different.
“What was intriguing to me was just wanting to be in some lighter air,” he says. “The show leads with a lot of heart and a lot of comedy and a lot of quirkiness and characters that I think you grow to be invested in. It was compelling to me because I’ve been doing a lot of darker stuff lately, and I really was wanting to live in a sort of even sillier world.”
And so, he’s spritzed to look sweaty on a blustery day as winter teases the Hudson Valley, a couple of hours north of Manhattan. Charles squares his shoulders and walks into an abandoned building transformed into The Blood Barn, Port Wenn’s Halloween haunted house.
A couple of dozen high school kids move, intentionally, as zombies. They’re joined by the journalists and influencers the production invited to the set to serve as background players, essentially human wallpaper. For reporters, it’s a chance to experience the behind-the-scenes as those scenes are reshoot endlessly. For influencers, it’s one way to skip auditions and try to slither into show business.
I was one of those reporters who became a background player, and my job was to look wowed as I entered the haunted house.
The night before, the production sent a memo about what to wear. The required palette of faded neutrals evaded me. I own summer black and winter black, with a little spring and fall black thrown in for abandon. I know how to dress for funerals (clearly) and many occasions. But dressing for a lobstering village on the Maine coast stumped me.
When I arrived on set, the wardrobe department put me in a plum pullover, a maroon plaid flannel shirt, and a greige sweater so hideous it could turn a sheep off wool. Although the look was flinty New Englander, hair and makeup were required. Kudos to the stylist who gave me the best ponytail I’ve ever had.
A constant about sets is that the tone is set from Number 1 on the call sheet, and here it’s Charles. A grip mentions that Charles took a bunch of production assistants to dinner and drinks and asked about their goals in the industry.
Later, when I ask Charles about this, he’s embarrassed—because he hadn’t yet invited others and doesn’t want anyone to feel slighted. He’s hosted meals for the crew since he was on The Good Wife.
Being on a set is a treat, and this gave me a new perspective. Usually, I perch on a director’s chair, behind the folks in charge, and scribble notes into a pad.
Over the years, I’ve observed scenes reshot dozens of times, but it’s different when an assistant director tells you where to stand and how to react.
Standing in machine-made fog up to my knees and feigning care as a teenage zombie stumbles over to me, then showing wonder at the decorations inside the spooky house, was new. And quickly grew old. It always surprises me how many hours go into a scene that’s over in moments on TV.
After this scene, they break for lunch, and I wound up next to Cree (And Just Like That), who plays Charles’ kooky but incisive administrative assistant, Elaine. She desperately wants to become a social media star.
“He’s probably the only person in town who doesn’t like her, and she’s probably the only person who does like him,” Cree says. “I get to do every scene with Josh Charles, and 90 percent of our scenes are just him and me. He’s a doctor, but he’s an idiot.”
Dr. Best is certainly uncaring and unreceptive to social cues.
“Is he on the spectrum?” Tuccillo asks. “Is he not on the spectrum? He’s a surgeon, so he’s also very specific. He doesn’t like to be around people, and in Port Wenn, everyone will be dragging him into their personal lives.”
Port Wenn features such small-town TV staples as an oafish handyman and a dim sheriff, but at least it’s more inclusive. A mixed-race gay couple owns the restaurant. They’re lovely and welcoming to Best, who is nasty.
“He’s this crummy, impatient, medical savant of a genius,” Charles says. “To get that successful, and what he’s gone through early in his life, and the trauma that he’s dealt with in his life, and the lack of warmth and communication, and his family structure, I think it put him on this track to just become really good at what he does. But as is often the case with a lot of those things, there’s a catch, and the catch is that he’s an extremely lonely individual. I feel strongly that he has a real heart.”
Louisa, the teacher, senses that, despite her initial wariness of this aggressively antisocial man. Still, their intro has the whiff of a Hallmark meet-cute. She’s fresh off her broken engagement to the town sheriff, played by Josh Segarra (Arrow, Sirens). Louisa quickly realizes that Best is an expert diagnostician, which helps her understand his value.
Huddling by a heater in a tent, bundled in a puffy jacket, Spencer shares, “They say never work with your heroes. I disagree. I have loved Annie Potts ever since I can remember. And I will say, her work, like, everything that she does, has a little bit of magic to it, and it’s because she’s a magical human being. She models grace, and I would say a deep understanding of the process, and kindness to everyone, and patience.
“We’ve been shooting in the middle of the woods,” Spencer continues. “We’re down by the ocean, we’re by a bog; it’s a very location-heavy show, her fortitude within that is a great model to me.”
Upcoming episodes reveal Louisa and Martin finding common ground, though he makes nothing easy. Besides an unbending outlook, he lacks a sense of humor and bedside manner.
Rude, imperious, demanding, persnickety, observant, and painfully logical, Martin Best shares many character traits with Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory.
On that sitcom and its spinoffs, Young Sheldon and Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, Potts plays the main character’s Meemaw. On those shows and this, she’s the one person who loves the main character unconditionally but takes none of his high-handed crap. (It also needs to be said that Potts rocks lobsterwoman gear.)
“She calls him out,” Potts says. “And she’s the only one who can, but she knows the hurt he’s been through. I think that’s the real reminder of art. It’s like, I know how you feel. That’s how I’m able to reproduce that feeling and let you in on that you’re not alone in that. So, I have great hopes for the show.”
Of course, actors are often effusively positive about new projects, even when evidence suggests otherwise. However, Potts, a Southerner with impeccable manners, is also delightfully unfiltered. At 74, she’s experienced great TV, having starred in Designing Women, Any Day Now, and the gone-too-soon GCB.
“This feels in my gut like one of them,” Potts says. “We had a new director come on a couple of weeks ago, and told the cast, ‘I think this is the show that America needs. It just doesn’t know it yet.’”
Some will find Best Medicine corny, and some characters–the sheriff, the handyman–are broadly drawn. Potts wistfully considers the show’s main theme, community. We’re talking on a day when masked, armed men are marching through cities, kidnapping people off the streets.
A caring community has never been more essential.
“We can be in community and care about each other and take care of each other, and even if we have our differences, we still can love each other,” Potts says. “And I think that it has all of that.”
