Don’t you love when your favorite actors team up to make great television? “A Young Doctor’s Notebook,” a dark comedy from the UK, brings together Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter, duh) and Jon Hamm (of “Mad Men”) as the same man at different ages in his life.
Based on Russian author and doctor Mikhail Bulgakov’s accounts of his youth, the show focuses on the early career of a young doctor during the Russian Revolution. Having recently graduated with top marks from medical school in Moscow, the doctor is dismayed to receive a posting at a hospital in the small and remote village of Muryevo. With only a field doctor and two midwives (one of whom constantly remarks on how he fails to live up to his predecessor) as his assistants, the doctor realizes his textbook knowledge isn’t enough and faces the hardships of performing surgery, losing patients, his own illnesses and the isolation that the small village life.
It might not sound like a comedy, but the fun and absurdity come from Hamm’s character as an older version of the doctor, reading from his diary sixteen years later and giving advice to his younger self. It may not make sense for two versions of the doctor to appear together so often, especially since the older doctor’s advice doesn’t seem to change his future and the two actors share little resemblance (Radcliffe is half a foot shorter than Hamm and Hamm’s attempted English accent is dire). But the show’s best moments come every time the two share the screen.
An extremely quirky show, the first season of “A Young Doctor’s Notebook” consists of only four half–hour episodes, so it’s the length of an average movie and can be watched in one sitting. Why wouldn’t you use your free time to watch Harry Potter and Don Draper bicker while sitting in a bathtub together?
