This cosy medical drama does exactly what it sets out to do – soothe viewers’ souls with a celebration of smalltown values and secret goodness. It’s TV where nothing will distress you
Well, what in the cultural cringe is going on here? Of all the things I could possibly have imagined the US would take an interest in to the point of executing a straight-to-series commission, Doc Martin would not have been one of them. And yet here we are: Dominic Minghella’s creation, starring Martin Clunes as a crotchety GP in the fictional sleepy Cornish village Portwenn, which ran for 10 series on ITV between 2004 and 2022, has been tweaked for a new market and relabelled Best Medicine because it never really worked as a pun on Dr Martens anyway. Like 99% of puns, actually, but that’s probably a discussion for another time.
Clunes is now Josh Charles. The character’s name is Dr Martin Best instead of Ellingham, otherwise the new title wouldn’t work, and he went to Harvard medical school instead of Imperial College London. But he is still cantankerous – by medical teatime drama standards, which is to say that he barely approaches normal human levels of irritability. And he is still a vascular surgeon who developed a fear of blood, had to abandon surgery and decided instead to inflict his lack of bedside manner on the good people of Port Wenn, now two words and in Maine, where he used to stay in the summer as a child.
Best Medicine aired on Sky One and is on Now
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