A YOUNG DOCTOR’S NOTEBOOK

*** (out of ****)

Jon Hamm opens up one of the notebooks he wrote when he first became a doctor. We flashback to young Jon Hamm, played by Daniel Radcliffe, as he arrives at a hospital in Middle-of-Nowhere, Russia, for his first assignment after graduation. Radcliffe then begins to speak to an imaginary friend, his older self, still played by Jon Hamm. It’s disorienting at first, but that’s because when an older character sends us into a flashback, usually we are fully immersed in the memory. Here, we are held at a distance from the story, so we can get the older doctor’s reactions to what he’s reading. Radcliffe and Hamm interact, but it’s not in a way that speeds up Radcliffe’s learning process. Instead, we get a before-and-after picture, without the thick black line separating the two, allowing us to see how the bumbling child became the drug-addicted ego maniac.

I have no idea where this show came from. I didn’t hear about it being made. I barely know anything about the network it premiered on, Ovation, which apparently has been around for thirty years. I have no idea how Hamm and Radcliffe fell into this project, or how well they knew each other before it was filmed. But in spite of the obvious differences in looks (i.e. Radcliffe’s startlingly attractive ruggedness), the two men become one character as if they have been doing it for years. Not by mimicking the other’s looks or quirks, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis in Looper, but by instead together inventing a tone. After one episode, you can’t imagine any other actor taking over either part. Plus, knowing that the older Hamm exists means that Radcliffe makes it out of this snow hell, something you probably wouldn’t think without him.

At moments, the show feels like late-night Adult Swim, and then suddenly you feel like you’re watching FX, or even FXX. It’s all very crazy, especially since it refuses to shoot anything in a way that announces its craziness. If you glanced at this show while it was on mute, you’d think it was neither Adult Swim nor FXX, but something that would follow Downton Abbey on PBS. In a crowded fall season, full of hacky bulshit contantly screaming at me, A Young Doctor’s Notebook is an oasis, if for no other reason that I have to – and want to – think on it more.

-Ryan Haley