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Set & ContinueEngland2004(50 min)
Created by Dominic Minghella, this popular situation comedy from England recently finished its fifth season and a sixth is on the way. Based on the fictional Doctor Martin Bramford from the movie Saving Grace (2000), the title character is a brilliant surgeon who began his career in London but relocated to the small coastal town of Port Isaac in Cornwall because of his social and psychological idiosyncrasies. Lacking not only a bedside manner but any social skills whatsoever, Doc Martin (Martin Clunes) also has a debilitating phobia for a surgeon—fainting or vomiting at the sight of blood. The sustaining tension of the series is whether he can balance his considerable talents and limitations, arousing the question: what caused him to be so socially inept in the first place.
As in the case of the popular American television series, House and Bones, the eccentric title character is rooted in the Anglo-American stereotype of the brilliant surgeon who is boorish and rude. Yet in all three series this stereotype is endowed with new cultural resonance by suggesting the good doctor may have Asperger’s syndrome. Though mentioned explicitly by one of the other characters in the series, this diagnosis remains unconfirmed. However, it is heightened by the doctor’s encounter with another character (usually a child) who has a more severe form of ASD, and (in the British series) by references to contemporary controversies over what causes autism —e.g., “the vaccine wars” and Bruno Bettelheim’s disturbing theory of “the refrigerator mother.”
Unlike the American series, Doc Martin also draws on and expands the traditional stereotype of the talented British eccentric. To appreciate these dynamics, one need only consider the many recent “updated” versions of Sherlock Holmes: not only the period action films starring a frenetic Robert Downey Jr. with Jude Law as Watson, but also the 2010 British TV series Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch as the hyperactive Holmes, and the 2012 American series Elementary, where Jonny Lee Miller’s Sherlock is a recovering British drug addict aided by a female, Asian Dr. Watson played by Lucy Liu. Whether it’s the brilliant detective or doctor, the peculiarities of this idiosyncratic fictional character are pushed to new extremes, as if encouraging us spectators to tap in on what most of us know (or think we know) about those on the spectrum.
In one episode of Doc Martin, the diagnosis of Asperger’s is delivered by an obnoxious psychologist whose family temporarily moves in next to Luisa (Caroline Catz), the local teacher and Doc Martin’s love interest. Though this diagnosis is neither confirmed nor proven wrong, it firmly plants this possibility in our mind. Yet in the same episode, the psychologist’s judgment becomes highly suspect when he tells Martin that he and his wife refused to have their son vaccinated because they believe it causes autism. Whereas Luisa seems to share this opinion, Doc Martin vigorously attacks it, citing the details of the one study that supported it and was later found to be bogus. The plot also proves Martin to be right, for the psychologist’s unvaccinated son comes down with TB. Still, the diagnosis of Martin’s Asperger’s remains ambiguous, especially if we recall another episode of the series in which we briefly meet his parents, who are extremely cold, unloving and rejecting. These negative qualities are most extreme in his mother, who is like a caricature of Bettelheim’s “refrigerator mother.” The search for the cause goes on.