NOW ENTERTAINMENT Jan. 00 5 - 11, 2025 Month - 00, 2023
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Scott Wolf (“Party of Five”) returns to series work in “Doc,” a Fox drama premiering Tuesday, Jan. 7. Molly Parker stars in “Doc”
Cover Story Doctor’s order: Scott Wolf returns to series work in Fox’s ‘Doc’ By Jay Bobbin Scott Wolf has played doctor before, but not in the way he does in a new series. The veteran of such shows as “Party of Five” and “Nancy Drew” was a medical man in the then-WB’s “Everwood” and NBC’s “The Night Shift,” and he returns to that profession — and weekly TV work — as a physician with his own agenda in “Doc,” a Fox drama premiering Tuesday, Jan. 7. Based on a fact-inspired Italian series “Doc – Nelle tue mani,” it casts Molly Parker (“Lost in Space”) as Dr. Amy Larsen, a Minneapolis hospital’s no-nonsense internal medicine chief who suffers a brain injury in a car accident, erasing the past eight years of her memory. She’s shocked by how much she suddenly can’t remember, including her divorce from the facility’s chief medical officer, Dr. Michael Hamda (Omar Metwally, “The Affair”). Her colleague Dr. Richard Miller (Wolf) knows she has dam-
aging information on him that could end his career, though she can’t remember it now; as he assumes her job while she fights to remain a doctor, he worries that she might eventually recall what she knew. Charlotte Fountain-Jardim (“Ted”) plays the teenage daughter on whom Amy relies to help her fill in missing pieces of her past. “Doc” cast regulars also include Amirah Vann (“How to Get Away With Murder”), Jon-Michael Ecker (“Queen of the South”) and Anya Banerjee (“The Blacklist”). The executive producers of “Doc” include Barbie Kligman (“Private Practice”) and Hank Steinberg (“Without a Trace”), and they “made it clear that they had no interest in a sort of mustache-twirling, on-thenose bad guy,” Wolf says. “One of the interesting things about the show is that every character in it, including the central one, is a beautiful but flawed human being. There
really are no ‘good people’ or ‘bad people’ here, just people who are doing the best they can to take care of themselves and their families. “My character happens to be a good person who has wound up in a very bad situation,” the friendly Wolf adds. “Even the most sinister characters within a story never see themselves as bad people. There’s always something guiding them to do what they believe in, and in this case, Richard is living parallel lives ... one that he can show everyone and the other that’s completely hidden from view. He has to manage himself and bear the burden of himself.” Wolf appreciates that “Doc” lets him continue pursuing the different types of parts he has long sought: “When I finished ‘Party of Five’ years ago, my biggest worry — as I think it is for any actor who comes off a series that’s lasted a significant amount of time — was, ‘Is this the only way that people are
going to be able to see me?’ That character, Bailey Salinger, was an earnest person who wore his heart on his sleeve, so I worried, ‘Can I play someone who people can’t trust?’” Shows including “V” and “The Nine” afforded Wolf such opportunities, he believes, “so I feel like I have been utilized in ways that feel interesting [to] me. What happens when you take someone who had a niceguy face and put him in a role where you’re not quite sure how you feel about that person? I think that makes for a fun challenge, and not just for me but also for the audience.” With “Doc,” Wolf reasons that he’s “taking that to a whole new level. The level of commitment to the secrets that Richard holds is deeper and more powerful than with any other character I’ve played up to this point. When you’re given somebody who has to be two different people from one moment to the next, it’s pretty interesting stuff to work from.”
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