Molly Parker Shines in Doc

A Show With A Strong Female Lead Doesn’t Remember How To Be Strong Any More

One of the subtler ways Deadwood had an impact on the era of Peak TV is that it was easily the first of HBO’s great dramas where the female characters got to be more than just attachments of the male ones. This was one of the greatest flaws of The Sopranos and for all the impact The Wire had on television, it by and large didn’t have many interesting women in its diverse cast. That Deadwood did might seem contradictory: David Milch was writing a revisionist Western but the women were still little more than wives and whores.

And yet all five actresses who had roles on Deadwood proved the source of so much of the best drama, showing an inner ferocity and melancholy among their work which led all of them to work consistently through the more than two decades since the show came to a premature end. Anna Gunn has had the biggest impact (not all of it positively viewed) for her work as Skyler on Breaking Bad but the same can be said of all the other actresses: Paula Malcolmson has constantly worked as wives who are often left at the mercy of their husbands to find their own paths (most famously in Ray Donovan). Kim Dickens has frequently worked as women trying to strike out on their own in bleak landscapes, whether it be trying to be a sous chef in post Katrina New Orleans in Treme or more famously trying to find a path in the apocalypse in The Walking Dead franchise. Robin Weigert has moved away from her incredible work as Calamity Jane to mostly play caregivers trying to guide other troubled women, most famously as Celeste’s psychiatrist on Big Little Lies.

Molly Parker’s work as Alma Garrett was the biggest female role on the show, a drug addicted wife who is dragged to the camp by her husband and finds a way to survive as a mother and owner of a gold claim, while nevertheless being dragged by her worst impulses time and again. Her ethereal beauty, which can best be described as looking haunted, often gave lie to the fact that there was steel underneath. Much of her work in the years since has often been overlooked (her work as Abby in the network drama The Firm was her biggest role as a lead) but when she has the right role (as she did as Molly Sharp, Frank’s replacement as minority whip who makes it clear she has an independent streak in House of Cards) she is magnificent. She’s never entirely stopped work but very few of the roles she’s had have been of the same level as Alma on Deadwood. Now for the first time in two decades of working on television, she has finally become the lead on Doc, a series that would be fascinating in its own right with a lesser lead but who Parker raises to a new level.

Parker plays Dr. Amy Larsen, the chief of internal medicine who when we first meet her is the kind of doctor with the kind of abrasive attitude that Gregory House would admire. She treats her subordinates with disrespect, barely seems to talk to anyone, and we’re astonished to learn she actually has a friend. When she meets with the chief of staff (Omar Metwally) it’s clear that their have been many complaints about her to HR and she has been ignoring them.

Then she gets involved in a car wreck and suffers blood loss in the brain when being operated on. When she wakes up she has forgotten the past eight years of her life — and then we learn about the aftereffects. The chief of staff was her husband. She has a daughter who doesn’t speak to her anymore. And she was in an accident seven years ago and her other child her son was killed in it. That is in at least part of why she is who she is: we learn that she threw herself into work, essentially pushed away her husband and her daughter and has become increasingly acerbic to everyone except two people. One is her best friend, Gina Walker (Amirah Vann) the other is a slightly younger chief resident (Jon-Michael Ecker) with whom she was having an affair — and now has no memory of it.

Parker is magnificent showing all the sides of Larsen which the series decides to show in various flashbacks: we see the cold workaholic, the utterly broken mother who can’t find a way out of bed, the loving mother, the woman still looking to connect. In the present she can only cling to one thing: being a doctor again. The problem is, while her memory of the last eight years are gone as a person, the parts of her personality that have clearly made her a problem are still getting in her way. She pushes her ex-husband to try and make her a doctor and when things go to slowly, she storms into a board meeting with her head still bandaged and looking indignant. She constantly thinks her knowledge as a doctor surpasses her current condition and Doc does not hide how her arrogance more often then not keeps hurting her colleagues — and in many cases, nearly killing the people she’s trying to help

Doc also goes out of its way to make clear that everyone else remembers the last eight years under Larsen and they don’t particularly want to make her life easier. Her ex-husband is willing to help her professionally as is Gina and its clear that the nurses and interns still think highly of her. The problem is there are more than a few people who don’t.

One of her biggest antagonists is Sonya Maitra (Anya Banerjee). Before the crash, she had filed multiple complaints against Larsen for creating a toxic work environment and while we have yet to see any flashbacks between the two, we know enough from the ones we see that she’s probably not wrong. She has no inclination to be friendly to her in the present, particularly as the hospital seems to be bending over backwards to try and help her get back to work. Smartly Maitra doesn’t argue racism as much as favoritism: after all, Larsen was married to the chief of staff so it’s hard to argue there isn’t a sliding scale. And Sonya is clearly a good doctor, it’s just that Larsen rubs her the wrong way.

Her primary adversary on the show is Richard Miller, played by Scott Wolf in one of his best roles. Wolf, like Parker, has worked constantly in TV for a long time (and still looks as boyish as he was on Party of Five) but he’s never had a role where he’s had to play someone has the most reason to want Larsen to fail. The day before the accident, Larsen seemed about to file a complaint that would have put Miller in a position where he could have been sued for malpractice and his career would have been ended. He and Larsen were the only ones who knew about it and her amnesia has not only saved his career, he has now taken her job as chief of internal medicine. He is terrified, justifiably, to learn whether Larsen’s memories will return and he is basically advised by his attorney that it is in his best interests for Larsen’s to fail.

It would be too easy for the show to set Miller up as the villain of the series, particularly because Amy’s memory has reset to the point that she considers him a friend and is willing to support him. But the writers are too smart for that. Miller is a good doctor, and when Larsen constantly makes mistakes that endanger patients lives he has the moral high ground. In last night’s episode Heller, in order to make Amy’s first day back easier, switched her assignment from being with Sonya to Dr. Coleman, one of the few doctors who appreciates her treatment. While treating a patient she diagnosed him as being an alcoholic, and though it went beyond the scope of the restrictions, essentially influenced Coleman to do things a certain way, leading to the patient leaving AMA and only being found when he collapsed unconscious outside the hospital. Miller was clearly right when he called out not only Larsen but both her intern and the chief resident — in addition to everything else Larsen had been wrong about her diagnosis and as a result the patient was almost certainly go to die. And for all his unwillingness to have her succeed, Miller has no interest in letting innocent people become collateral damage: when Larsen called him with information he listened and was clearly willing to take her advice to save the patient. Miller may want Larsen to fail but he still took the same oath she did and the show knows that.

It didn’t shock me that, much like the superb medical drama Brilliant Minds, Doc is based on a true story, albeit one set in Italy rather than America. And Parker is superb in another very pleasing trend for both network television and TV as a whole; in the last two years we’ve been getting a series of exceptional female-led network dramas with fascinating actresses playing wonderful leads. Last year we got Shanola Hampton in Found and Carrie Preston in Elsbeth. This year we’ve already gotten Kathy Bates’s remarkable revival of Matlock (which has already sparked talk of Emmy nominations) and Kaitlin Olson’s superb High Potential. The latter two series have become critical and audience darlings which have already been renewed for a second season. Parker’s work as Doc has that same potential and for a network that has been having some intriguing new dramas air in the last few years, Fox is showing that has an ability to move away from the by-the-numbers procedurals it does and move into fascinating territory. Doc is lighter in tone from such standouts as Accused and The Cleaning Lady but it has the potential to be just as brilliant and successful. It couldn’t happen to a better actress.

My score: 4 stars.