Does Fox’s New Medical Drama ‘Doc’ Spell the End of ‘The Resident’?
Hopes for a seventh season of The Resident may have just been squashed. Fox announced April 3 that it has ordered a U.S. version of Italian hit medical series Doc, set to premiere in the 2023-2024 season.
From executive producers Barbie Kligman (Magnum P.I., Secrets and Lies, Private Practice), Hank Steinberg (For Life, Without a Trace), and Erwin Stoff (I Am Legend, The Matrix) comes Doc, a “heroic” new story based on Italy’s Doc — Nelle tue mani (“in your hands”). The Italian series featured The White Lotus Season 2 stars Simona Tabasco and Beatrice Grannò and debuted in 2020. It follows Dr. Andrea Fanti, who has to adjust to a world of strangers after losing 12 years of memories as the result of a brain injury.
Fox has given Doc a straight-to-series order. The U.S. iteration, which Fox says provides “storytelling excellence,” will center “on the hard-charging, brilliant Dr. Amy Elias, Chief of Internal and Family Medicine at Westside Hospital in Minneapolis,” the logline describes.
“After a brain injury erases the last eight years of her life, Amy must navigate an unfamiliar world where she has no recollection of patients she’s treated, colleagues she’s crossed, the soulmate she divorced, the man she now loves, and the tragedy that caused her to push everyone away,” it continues. “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 practicing medicine, despite having lost nearly a decade of knowledge and experience.”
“This moving and heroic medical drama is the very definition of storytelling excellence and what audiences have come to expect from FOX,” Michael Thorn, President of Scripted Programming, FOX Entertainment, said in a statement announcing the series. “Doc explores the raw emotion, redemption, and resilience of the human spirit in ways we rarely see, and for that, we credit the creative leadership of Barbie, Hank, and Erwin, who we know will bring this story to spectacular life, this extraordinary source material and our deeply valued partners at Sony.”
“We are thrilled with Barbie and Hank’s inspiring take on the emotionally captivating and globally acclaimed Italian series, and we couldn’t have a better partner in FOX to bring the format to the U.S.,” Katherine Pope, President, Sony Pictures Television Studios added.
It’s hard to imagine there will be space in the Fox slate for two medical dramas, despite fan pleas for another season of The Resident, which aired its Season 6 finale on January 17 and has yet to be cancelled or renewed. The cast and creators also expressed hopes for more. Showrunner Andrew Chapman had his “fingers crossed” for a renewal after the January finale.
“We just don’t know. I don’t think that Fox knows,” Chapman told TV Insider. “I don’t think anybody really knows. They hold out the possibility, but they won’t pick us up yet. We probably won’t know until April or May. They want to see how the rest of their shows do, et cetera, et cetera. Your guess is honestly as good as mine.”
Tom Griscom/FOX
If you thought the finale felt like a series-ender, that was intentional. As Chapman went on: “Given that we really don’t know and didn’t know whether this was going to be a series finale, creator Amy Holden Jones and I really thought hard about how we would construct storylines that would give closure to the season, but if it had to be a series finale, would give our audience and our fans some closure to the whole series, too.”
In the absence of an official announcement regarding the show’s fate, The Resident remains in limbo. Fox’s newest dramas, Accused and Alert: Missing Persons Unit, have both been renewed for second seasons. Notably, both are crime dramas, so perhaps Fox is willing to have multiple shows in similar genres. But only time will tell.
Doc will be co-produced by Sony Pictures Television and FOX Entertainment Studios. Kligman serves as showrunner and executive producer. Steinberg (Channel Road Productions) and Stoff (3 Arts Entertainment) are executive producers. Doc — Nelle tue mani premiered on Italy’s Rai 1 in 2020 and ranked as the network’s No. 1 series premiere since 2007. Since then, the format has been sold in 12 countries with seven versions already made. It was created by Francesco Arlanch and Viola Rispoli and produced by Lux Vide, a Fremantle Company.
Doc, Series Premiere, 2023, Fox
