Best Medicine

The Anatomy of a Grudge

There’s a particular TV setup that always makes me brace myself: the brilliant jerk gets chewed up by big-city life, then washes ashore in some aggressively adorable small town full of oddballs. We’ve all seen the pattern. So when Fox rolled out *Best Medicine*, its American take on the long-running British hit *Doc Martin*, my first response was basically a groan. Another one of these? Really?



And yet, against my better instincts, this one mostly works. Liz Tuccillo shifts the prickly Dr. Martin Best (Josh Charles) from Boston to Port Wenn, a fictional fishing town in Maine where he once spent summers as a kid. He lands there after a sudden, career-ending phobia of blood blows up his life as a surgeon. LA Times critic Robert Lloyd wrote that the show has "more whimsy but less real than *Doc Martin*," which feels about right. It has the softened edges of American network TV all over it. The sunlight is warmer, the locals are pushed a little harder into quirk. But Tuccillo makes one smart move: she keeps all that charm tethered to actual bodily unease.

What really gives the show its pulse is Josh Charles. If your recent memory of him is tied to the darkness of *The Handmaid's Tale*, it’s easy to forget how dry and funny he can be. He doesn’t just act out Martin’s social dysfunction; he carries it around in his frame. He moves through Port Wenn like his clothes are stiff, itchy, and one bad inch too tight. His neck barely loosens. Every time someone corners him with small talk, his whole body seems to shrink away before he says a word. The performance lands because it feels physical. Martin isn’t merely irritated by these people. Being seen by them clearly scares him.



The clearest example comes late in the season, in episode seven’s "Blood Factory" sequence. The town stages an annual haunted house drenched in gore for a local horror author, and Martin, desperately concealing his hemophobia, has to push through all that fake carnage to reach Louisa (Abigail Spencer), the local schoolteacher he is very much in love with and very much pretending otherwise about, after she gets genuinely sick inside. The director mounts the camera right on Charles’s chest, and the result is this warped, claustrophobic close-up while red corn syrup flies everywhere. For a few minutes the sitcom shell just falls away. It starts breathing like a thriller. You can almost feel the panic clawing its way up his throat.

The rest of the cast does important work keeping the whole thing from drifting off into pure whimsy. Annie Potts is, unsurprisingly, terrific as Aunt Sarah, a no-nonsense lobster fisherwoman who has zero interest in treating her nephew gently. Josh Segarra, as Sheriff Mark, brings exactly the kind of goofy, eager warmth that bounces well off Charles’s human brick wall. (Segarra really has become one of those actors who always seems to know where the laugh lives.) Spencer has the trickier assignment as Louisa, who could easily have ended up as just the sensible love interest, but she gives her enough bite and irritation that she feels like a person, not a reward.



No, I don’t think *Best Medicine* is reinventing much. It probably knows that. Sometimes a show just needs to fit well and hold together, like a sweater you keep reaching for because it was made properly. By the end of the 11-episode season, Martin isn’t healed, and Port Wenn hasn’t suddenly become less exasperating. What changes is smaller and truer than that. They start figuring out how to live with one another’s damage. Honestly, that may be one of the more believable versions of community TV is offering right now.