Doc House

Hooked on meh

Extremely the target audience for this except for not currently being in the market for a bike.

I knew I’d be watching all five trillion episodes of Doc Martin from the get-go, given that this is, as I mentioned, a cross between Midsomer Murders and House and features Stephanie Cole from Waiting For God as an organic farmer and keeper of prized chickens. The show was made for me, and a woman can only watch so much Frasier. America, I’ve learned, has free streaming of (bad, late-season) Designing Women, and Maude, which is kind of interesting for archival purposes, but American this ain’t, and I’m not paying for anything beyond Britbox at the moment so until that increasingly pointless subscription ends (why did you remove Fawlty Towers and Benidorm???), PlutoTV it is.

Every episode of Doc Martin is basically the same: the titular doctor is interpersonally awful but sort of brilliant, the villagers have money troubles and resent Londoners. The visual silliness brings few surprises: the plumber-turned-restauranteur father-and-son deal with burst pipes they can’t handle, and the blood-phobic doctor finds himself positively drenched in the stuff. Will he vomit, or will it be more of a stifled gag?

The show is recentish (2000s) but from the Before Times, so thus far racial diversity is a (possibly realistic for village life in Cornwall) nil. The entire show revolves around a tortured-genius male protagonist with an is-he-or-isn’t-he Aspergers plot. Even if you have never seen Doc Martin, you have seen Doc Martin. I’m too pro-rerun to object to any of this on principle but he is not particularly compelling as tortured geniuses go. He’s a competent doctor, fine, but these are not exactly House-level cases. We all knew that the yokel chewing on his hair in every scene would turn out to have an enormous hairball in his stomach and nothing more concerning (unless that is more concerning than a tumor, I have no idea).

Also because Before Times, there are women everywhere throwing themselves at Doc Martin, for no perceivable reason other than the fact that it is, after all, his television show. How exactly he came to get the beautiful local schoolteacher pregnant is anyone’s guess—surely he’d have recoiled at bodily fluids not to mention insisted they have sex in full-body condoms—but he did, and reacts to this by… trying to keep her from having a job. A woman in her condition, etc., etc., like he actually tries to interfere and make her unemployed, but how exactly does he imagine this single-mother-to-be will support herself? I know from a promo photo from a later season that this will resolve itself by them (ugh) getting back together and having more children, but this has yet to happen.

Adorable local dogs also follow Doc Martin around, and, as with attractive women, he rebuffs.

I’m not even sure whether to call this conservative, but there’s this kind of hierarchy in the show of women fixated on Doc Martin, in terms of frumpiness and wife-material. There’s Louisa, the schoolteacher he impregnated during a brief engagement, who is not just pretty but young, sweet, and a little bit stupid. (She has her anti-vaxx monologue, etc.)

Then there’s her rival for this very unappealing man’s affections, a same-age (as the doctor) lady who is, despite being a woman, also a doctor (he himself speaks of his own possible future replacement as “he” because he’s like that), the things they allow these days. The lady-doctor has a terrible hairstyle, and her job is fertility doctor, because it would have to be, because she is all about the unnatural, unlike Louisa, who is Woman.

And finally, there’s the utterly epic pharmacist character, played by Selina Cadell, resident Midsomer Murders frump (aka she plays one on two episodes), who’s great in roles that call for basically a sinister Janine Duvitski. She LOVES Doc Martin (but why, why?), despite being at first it seems a tragic spinster, but then a terrible long-distance husband is introduced.

We know that the one true love has to be Louisa, because she’s perfect, and he does kind of get this, but wherever I am in season 4, they’re still will-they-won’t-they. I know they will but am at this point more curious what the show will do when 2009 gives way to such years as 2016 and 2020, seeing as this extremely non-Now show evidently ran until 2022. Will someone with a hint of a tan move to the village? Will we be getting the doctor’s Jordan Petersonish take on pronouns? Can I even stream the later seasons or will I be left wondering forever?