For showrunners Hank Steinberg and Barbie Kligman, the prognosis is good. “Doc,” the Italian drama series that the pair have adapted for Fox and Sony Pictures Television, got off to a strong start this week.
The series, toplined by Molly Parker, blends medical procedural elements with a larger mystery around a hard-charging surgeon, Dr. Amy Larsen, who suffers from an eight-year gap in her memory after a traumatic brain injury. As she recovers, she gradually becomes aware of the massive life changes that were blocked by the memory loss, including the death of her son and the end of her marriage. The time frame of the storytelling shifts between 2016 to 2024 in ways that keeps viewers on their toes.
Steinberg is a seasoned TV drama creator and executive producer whose past series include CBS’ “Without a Trace,” ABC’s “The Nine” and “For Love” and TNT’s “The Last Ship.” He’s known for delivering stylish procedurals that tackle weighty contemporary issues. Here, Steinberg discusses the process of tackling his first medical series in collaboration with fellow network drama veteran Kligman.
How did the Italian rendition of “Doc” come on your radar?
Sony had acquired the rights and they sent it to me. I watched all of Season 1 pretty quickly. The first thing I thought is, how to adapt it for an American audience, how to make it different. In the Italian version, the lead was male and the time difference was 12 years. And the daughter, for example, was already in college. And some of the other things were similar. But as I digested it, I thought the first thing we should do is flip the genders. I thought we could make that more interesting in the American version. And I liked the idea of the character has become walled up and guarded and really, really tough on people. And I thought that reaction to grief is something we’ve seen in men quite a lot on television, but I feel like we haven’t seen that in a woman who was warm and soulful and empathetic who because of a terrible thing that happened to her really changed and became so difficult to reach. I immediately thought that was something that would make the American show feel a little fresher and just different.
It is jarring in one of the early scenes with a pregnant woman who is her patient to hear her say ‘You don’t have to like me now, you can like me after I save your life.” She’s a very brusque doctor.
And that felt more interesting to me, and I thought we could really find a great actress to play all the complexities of this role. And then I also thought that 12 years [of memory loss] is a bit too long of a time. And I thought that dichotomy between 2016 and 2024 would be really powerful. And then, of course, I went looking for a female writer to collaborate with. I’ve known Barbie Kligman I’ve known over the years. We just rolled up our sleeves and got to work. It was an enormously fruitful collaboration. And Molly is incredible. She has such depth and complexity, and she really can play all sides of the character. And not only can she play all sides of the character — the arrogance, the roughness, the warmth, the empathy – she has a way of metabolizing all those facets. And you see as the series progresses, where we use flashbacks to show her before and after and you see her in the present struggling with how to understand who she became in the past. She metabolizes all the aspects of the best version of who this woman can be and the worst version of who the woman can be.
Hank Steinberg
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How do you and Barbie divide duties on the show? Was there something about her background that made her a fit for this show?
Barbie and I have known each other for years. We almost worked together once before. When I thought about who would be great to collaborate with, I immediately thought of her. I knew her father was a doctor and that she has written on a bunch of really successful medical shows. We watched the Italian version together and she connected with the same things that I did. The themes of second chances and the sliding doors aspect of the show. We had a really instant connection and the development process was really fun and collaborative. We did two scripts before the pickup, just her and me with our sleeves rolled up. We sorted out what the show was and who the characters were.
The idea of having someone to collaborate with on this was not because I need a woman to write a woman’s character — any more than only men can write for men. I felt a collaboration in this case would be well-suited to the project and given my other commitments, it felt right. She’s very gifted in writing humor which is a really necessary component of the show. And Barbie is an amazing, funny, empathetic and warm person to be around.
Landing Parker as your star was a score. So much of the story would be hard to believe in the hands of a less-talented actor.
She’s just a thoroughbred, and it’s just so fun. When you’re doing a show and you’ve got so many episodes to do and so many different things you want to explore, it’s important to know that anything you can throw at the actor — that they can not only handle it but elevate it. She really, really does that. Her ability to play all parts of the role, her ability to carry the complexity of the character through a very difficult situation. She has so much gravitas. I can’t say enough about her.
This show must be a puzzle to produce with the shifting time frames and the slow reveal of how Amy fills in her memory gap.
In the pilot, the flashbacks are her memories, and then occasionally the memories of her lover, in quick hits. But as we go through the series, we use omniscient flashbacks to show the missing years of what she doesn’t remember, so that the audience can be informed about the gaps. And then in some episodes, we use subjective flashbacks from other from other characters’ points of view.
From the first episode it seems like “Doc” blends procedural patient-of-the-week elements with the larger unfolding mystery of Amy’s memory loss. Is that a modern spin on a classic network TV medical drama?
Yes. In the second episode, she’s still in the hospital recovering, so the case of the week ends up being her roommate. And then once we get going from episodes three to 10, it’s typically an A and B medical story. And then the ongoing serialized elements with her character, her journey, her difficulty wrestling with memory loss. And then we have the flashback story in every episode as well. And those flashback stories — they’re not so formalized. They appear in different ways, but there’s always a flashback story that elucidates the past. So it works really well. So typically, she’s on one medical case, and then some of the supporting characters are on a different case. And then thematically, they overlap in some way.
You’ve got a lot of plates spinning.
It’s a lot. I often wish we had 48 minutes and not 42 but you know somehow we managed to squeeze it all in, which has always been the case on any network show I’ve had. I’ve always pushed another five or six minutes and fewer acts. In medical shows, it’s easier to do the act breaks than in police shows, because everything in the hospital is pretty emotional, and so you can turn an act break on an emotion rather than on a plot twist. So that you don’t feel as if you’re contorting yourself quite as much. When you’ve got to create a different suspenseful turn every seven minutes – that’s really hard.
You’ve done numerous network series in the past. How is the process different in this era? You debut on Fox and are streaming on Hulu the next day. Does that impact how you think about the show?
I’ve had some pretty good luck with where my shows have landed. “Without a Trace” was behind “CSI” when it was the biggest thing ever, and so that was enormously helpful. I have also had shows that did not benefit from great time slots. I think Tuesday at 9 is great for us. We have a pretty good lead-in and with Hulu as the immediate secondary marketplace for it, the numbers by which it’s judged will be a different than in the past. There definitely seems to be a more holistic way of looking at the numbers and the barometers of success and a lot more patience [with new shows] than there was in the past. So I’m really choosing not to fret over it. Also, [network and studio executives] are not even going to call us with the overnights anymore, because they just don’t even matter. So that’s refreshing from the older days when you were like freaking out every morning the day after your show was on at 6 a.m.
Where do you shoot?
Toronto. We use a local hospital façade and for some of the big interiors, like a lobby and a cafeteria, and then we build these beautiful sets on a stage.
Spoiler alert — regarding the accident that causes her memory loss. In all sincerity, have you thought about including a “Don’t text and drive” PSA at the end of the first episode?
It is literally the most dangerous thing you can do. I think they’ve proven that it’s way more dangerous than drunk driving. In the Italian version, the character gets shot in the head by an angry patient, and it’s pretty melodramatic. So I wanted to ground her injury in her character. She’s getting off work late at night. She’s a workaholic. She’s too tired, distracted, and she can’t resist checking her phone for the incoming message. … I don’t think we need a PSA, because you see the scene and you go, “I don’t want that to happen to me.”
