The drama series Doc began with the most literal of bangs. While the screen remained black, the sound-effects team knocked themselves out by creating a spectacular crashing noise. When the lights came on, we saw a smashed-up car containing ‘a female, unresponsive’. By the time she did respond – one major brain operation and seven seconds of the show later – it was apparent to the doctors that there was something high-concept wrong with her. As her colleagues at Minneapolis’s Westside hospital, they knew she was right to say her name was Amy Larsen, but her answers about her children’s ages, her current job status and the name of the president were all eight years out of date.
Amy had forgotten everything between 2016 and the present day. Which was in some ways just as well
Amy, you see, had forgotten everything between 2016 and the present (2024) day. Which, as it turned out, was in some ways just as well. In an equally efficient flashback sequence, we saw Amy (Molly Parker) as she’d been 24 hours before: basically a female House (the one played by Hugh Laurie), astonishingly brilliant at diagnosis, astonishingly rude to colleagues and patients. So rude, in fact, that her silver-fox boss, Dr Michael Hamda, told her that if she didn’t stop being appallingly brusque, she’d be in disciplinary trouble. (Her reply to this was, of course, appallingly brusque.)
Back with the post-crash Amy, the show provided more twists. Visited by Dr Hamda, she greeted him with a hug, a compliment on how grey hair suited him and an unmistakable glow of wifely love; at which point, he explained they divorced four years ago. Next came the news their son Danny had died three years before that; at which point, her memories of a happy family holiday – the kind where everybody runs about on a beach while laughing a lot – caused her to break down.
Danny’s death also neatly explains her metamorphosis from sweet-tempered, unambitious beach-laugher into the ogre she is today – or at least was until yesterday. After it happened, she’d duly ‘put up walls’ and ‘buried herself in her work’.
So is there any way back? In one scene, just in case we hadn’t spotted the implications of Amy’s amnesia, a friend told her that ‘the accident has given you something the rest of us never get – the chance to do things differently’. But is this really true? What will happen, for example, if she finds out she’s now in a relationship with another doctor at the hospital? Or that her ex-husband, who’s obviously smitten with the new/old Amy, mightn’t be as free as she hopes to act on his feelings?
Needless to say, none of this ever seems anything other than a nifty construct thought up by TV people in the quest for eyeballs. Happily, though, as such quests go, it’s so far a successful one. Amy’s plight might be improbably well shaped (or just improbable), but it’s also intriguing – and, thanks to Parker’s terrific central performance, emotionally affecting to boot.
All of which makes it seem easily strong enough to carry a television show – the problem being that the show itself doesn’t appear to agree. Instead, it rather nervously wraps the amnesia plot in the reassuring packaging of a standard US hospital drama, complete with mysterious diseases, medical jargon and implausibly gorgeous doctors. In the circumstances, some of this packaging may have been unavoidable – but here it’s positively, and distractingly, Amazon-sized.
Kevin Costner’s The West opened with the man himself in a suitably plaid shirt standing on a prairie and reminiscing about an unnamed western he’d watched when he was seven. And with that, Costner’s work was almost done.
From there, he appeared only as a somewhat minimalist narrator, as this first episode gave way to wordless dramatisations featuring blokes in feathered headgear and tricorn hats, and to lots of impressively informative historians.
This first episode gave way to blokes in feathered headgear and tricorn hats and lots of informative historians
The story began in the 1780s, before the west was all that western – and a period, I suspect, that most of us don’t know much about. Even so, the pattern for the next 100 years was soon set: the white settlers seeking ‘to make a home, no matter who was already there’; the US government trying to rein them in – but only for a bit; the Native Americans fighting back and losing.
At this stage, the action was in the area north of the Ohio river, comfortably east of the Mississippi and uncomfortably close to Canada – which meant that the Brits could play an undeniably perfidious part, backing the Native Americans right up until it was clear they were going to lose, and then abandoning them to their fate.
The programme appeared to regard this fate as both piercingly sad and historically inevitable: a reading that some viewers might well consider complacent. Unfortunately, by the end of a richly illuminating hour of television, it also seemed accurate.
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