After a car accident, Dr Amy Larsen wakes up in 2024 with no memory of the past eight years and has to rebuild everything – including her family, her worldview, her relationships and her career – from where she was in 2016. Emmy nominee Molly Parker (Deadwood, House of Cards) stars as Larsen, opposite the likes of Cannes Film Festival Male Revelation winner Omar Metwally (The Affair) and Jon-Michael Ecker (Queen of the South) in medical drama Doc, coming to M-Net (DStv Channel 101) from Monday 9 June at 7pm, and will also be available to stream on Showmax and DStv Stream.
Dr. Larsen awakens from her accident with no recollection of patients she’s treated, colleagues she’s crossed, the soulmate she divorced, the man she now loves or the tragedy that caused her to push everyone away. She can rely only on her estranged 17-year-old daughter, whom she remembers as a 9-year-old, and a handful of devoted friends, as she struggles to continue practising medicine, despite having lost nearly a decade of knowledge and experience.
Doc is based on an Italian TV series called Doc – Nelle tue mani (translated as “Doc – In Your Hands”) – but at its heart, it’s based on the true story of Italian doctor Pierdante Piccioni, who lost 12 years of memories after a car accident in 2013. He awoke from his coma believing it was 2001 and had to rediscover his identity, including not recognising his wife Maria and dealing with the fact that his sons, Filippo and Tommaso, were now adults. He’d also forgotten his medical education and had to confront the fact that he had a bad reputation. To understand who he was, Piccioni read over 65 000 emails he’d either sent or received.
He told People that the brain damage he sustained caused “a change of character, a change of personality, a change of way of life.” While he hasn’t recovered the 12 years of memories he lost, he admitted to the magazine that watching his life depicted on TV was an emotional experience, which opened some old wounds. Still, Piccioni continues to focus on the silver lining: “I hope when people watch Doc, they feel like they should never give up. It’s a story of hope”.
Variety hails the “fascinating” medical drama as “a fresh depiction of an exceptional doctor deeply wounded by the trials of life but given a second chance to do things differently.” Already renewed for a second season, Doc was Fox’s best series debut in more than five years, as well as Fox’s highest-rated and most-watched new drama this season.
Doc is produced by showrunners Hank Steinberg (Without a Trace, The Nine) and Barbie Kligman (Magnum P.I., CSI: NY, The Vampire Diaries). Steinberg told Variety that he gender-flipped the series for Doc because “…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.”
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