Having now given The Good Doctor a fair chance (i.e. I've watched 4 episodes), I guess I'm better qualified to give my reactions to it.
As I'd suspected before, the American production values didn't help me to like it. Too many pretty people doing heroic things, pointless bits of gratuitous sex (not particularly explicit, just stereotyped and banal), overdone background music rather than letting the plot speak for itself, and too much sentiment for my taste.
But I found it watchable and will very likely watch more episodes. It raised some interesting ethical questions. The protagonist bears some resemblance to a real life Aspie, though I'm still wondering whether his highly robotic intonation is all that representative of the neurotype. He reminds me of Data in Star Trek, who was a somewhat crude representation of an Aspie, perhaps because he wasn't really supposed to have ASD. I also think the protagonist is engineered to be a little bit too much like Rain Man, being very polarised, astonishingly clever in some ways and astonishingly "stupid" in others, with nothing much in the middle. Still, the show is clearly not supposed to represent real life, and I don't necessarily mind fiction being far-fetched as such.
I like the way they show his lack of eye contact. For me, even though it was a "throwaway" thing, it threw the matter into sharp focus, probably because "good" eye contact is usually consistently stronger in TV shows than it is in real life, so when it doesn't happen it really stands out, and I kept wanting to tell him to at least glance at people's faces to avoid coming over as weird. So I admired the way they'd handled that. It made me think about my own eye contact and wonder whether I ought to review whether I should try to improve it a little.
Two of the male doctors look so similar to me that I still can't tell them apart, which is naturally rather confusing and it makes it hard for me to follow some of the plots. Given that the makers were so aware of ASD, it's a pity they didn't cater a bit more for the Aspie audience in that respect, though I'm probably nitpicking.
In my view it's not a patch on Doc Martin, despite the similarity of the basic idea behind both shows (i.e. a highly-skilled doctor with a strange interpersonal style). I recommend Doc Martin to anybody who hasn't seen it. I'm tempted to say that it's objectively a much better show, but maybe there's no such thing as objective good and bad in TV shows, and there's no accounting for taste. I'm often surprised when they re-make British shows for American audiences, as they often leave me wondering how in the world anybody can prefer the USA versions to the originals, but maybe you'd have to be British to relate to that remark.
19 Jan 2024, 4:00 pm
