Doc Season 3 already feels like a bit of a reset, with Amy finding a renewed sense of purpose while also facing some new challenges.
And now, after the Doc Season 3 premiere, it seems Amy’s memories still play a huge role in her story, every bit as much as the new addition, Ben Grant. There’s no way of knowing where the series is headed next on that front.
Which is why it was such a pleasure to catch up with showrunner Hank Steinberg again to pick his brain about what we can anticipate this season!
We spoke with Hank about Amy’s new role, the challenges of mentoring the next generation of doctors, what Amy’s returning memories could mean for her future, and more!
Season 3 feels a bit like a soft reset. How does that open up possibilities for where you take the characters next this season?
Well, it’s nice for us to be able to come back. Two months have passed. Things can sort of settle and reset.
Amy’s been recovering from her surgery, and Michael and Jake have sort of drifted off away from Amy, Katie has gone off to college off camera, and everyone’s sort of coming back in a reset. Ben, Blair Underwood, is coming in — interviewing for a new job to start at the hospital. So, it all feels really fun for us.
And every season — it’s the same show, but it’s a different kind of identity, a different drive, a different track for Amy. And she’s coming in this year in a new position as chief resident. So, she’s got some authority again instead of being at the bottom, but she’s still not Chief of Medicine.
Now she’s got a somewhat resentful ex-husband who has his own aspirations and things that he wants to do.
And he’s really worried, understandably, about her brain and the reliability of her brain and some of her decision-making, and whether or not he’s going to keep getting put into a position where he has to cover for her or protect her. He’s kind of wary about her coming in.
So, it’s set up where Michael is kind of an antagonist in the sense that he doesn’t have the same goals as our hero, but he still loves her in his way, even though she said, I think we’d better move forward.
Now he’s sort of stuck with her in his department, with all the great things about her, but all the challenging things about her to him. So, it’s a fun dynamic.
The season premiere immediately dives into Amy’s brain healing after her health scare, but we can never fully trust that everything is okay, right? With her job and everything else on the line, will that continue to be an ongoing concern for her?
I mean, I think the first scene that you’re seeing in the show is Amy’s in an MRI machine. They are examining her brain. It’s healing, but there were seizures.
Is she going to have lots of memories? Is she going to relapse? The brain is a very mercurial thing, and with the TBI, there’s still a piece of glass stuck in her brain from her accident. They never got out.
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Get More of Our Coverage!So yeah, our premise of the season is that she has her own ideas about where her life is going. Is her brain going to let her get there?
By the end of episode one, you can see emotionally and psychologically that she’s trying to move forward, but she’s being slammed with more memories than ever. And it’s very, very distracting at minimum.
And we don’t know if it will start to become dangerous in the way that it did at the end of last season. So her brain is kind of like her superpower and also her Achilles’ heel at this point.
Blair Underwood’s Ben just came in, and he immediately starts shaking things up. It seems he’s planning on taking over a department, throwing Kostas under the bus, bringing a trial, and implying Amy isn’t at her best. He’s giving off some serious antagonist vibes. What can you tease about the trajectory of his character this season?
I mean, what’s fun about him is he’s a really, I mean, he’s a very complicated character. He has this past with Amy that is mysterious. We don’t understand.
We know they were together. We clearly didn’t go the distance. We don’t know what the nature of the breakup is.
He remembers, but she doesn’t. And we will start to come to understand. You haven’t seen episode two yet, right? Hasn’t been slipped to you yet?
Not yet!
So we will start to understand that there was potentially some intrigue around his trials and her involvement in it. And that’s going to be a really, really cool subplot that runs through the first half of the season, at least.
The cliffhanger at the end of the premiere had Ben calling Amy in a flashback about the trial, so it sounds like they were in bed in more ways than one. It sounds like there will be more trouble on the horizon.
He’s saying, you know, we’ve got trouble. So we don’t know what that was. But maybe it’s gone away. Maybe it hasn’t. Maybe it’s going to come back. Maybe, you know.
Doubtful. It never goes away. Trouble never goes away.
The truth must out, right?
Amy seems really dedicated this season to honoring Joan’s memory and taking that approach with her interns, trying to mentor them and lead with more empathy. What can you tease about that mentorship aspect? Because the interns are already a fun bunch.
Yeah. I mean, it’s an interesting metaphor, right? It’s her second chance at having a leadership position, even though she’s not the head of the whole department.
She’s running, you know, all the interns, which is a ton of responsibility. And it’s a chance for her to lead in a completely different way than she did in the past.
And it’s a challenge to the kind of person she’s going to be when you’re in charge of other people and need to teach other people to be a leader.
That’s very challenging, right? How do you teach and teach, especially in a job where life and death are on the line? How do you do that in a way that’s strong, decisive, but not cutting people down?
It was very challenging. You know, the stakes are very high when somebody makes a mistake. A young person makes a mistake in a new job.
It’s a really cool challenge for her character, who already struggles with, “Well, I’m the smartest person in the room. How do I harness that other side of me that is not so patient with fools and just wants to make sure the patient gets the best care and gets the most done?”
How does she balance that with raising young doctors?
And in another way, like the metaphor of it, if she failed in some degree as a mother with Katie for over those seven years, since Danny died, that she doesn’t remember, this is sort of an opportunity to be a better “mother” to these young interns who are looking to a role model and a leader to show them how to be.
So it’s a really cool way to put her character challenges into a very specific prism.
We’ve been building toward Sonya becoming her own version of a mini-Amy, and Amy realizing the “monster” she may have created because of how she treated Sonya in the past.
Sort of that interesting mentorship cycle of Joan to Amy to Sonya. What can we expect from that dynamic this season?
Well, I mean, one of the interesting things is that it’s not binary, like it’s not, you’re either horrible or you’re super nice. There are a hundred moments in a day with half a dozen interns in a day. And it’s interesting to see Sonya feeling like she tells Jake, “I’m going to go with tough love without the snark.”
But I think she’s going to see that it might be harder than she thinks to do the tough love without the snark. Like, what is snark?
What is snark to her? She may feel like she’s being just tough and fair, but it certainly might not be received by a younger generation of people. And that’s one of the things we’re exploring: there is a younger generation who really likes to be treated in a certain way.
Quote unquote, respect. And, you know, respect may or may not have been earned yet.
I think one of the things we’re challenging is where the line is between being a good teacher, a tough teacher, a compassionate teacher, a sensitive teacher, a patient teacher, and which mode is actually right.
We may be challenging that some of the things that Amy did in the past may actually have been effective. Sonya is here because Amy, like Amy says in that flashback, “You’ll call me in a couple of years and thank me.”
Which is what I say to my kids all the time, you know? I schlepped my daughter to synagogue yesterday for Yom Kippur, and she didn’t want to go. And I said, “You are going.” And she said, ” It doesn’t even matter. I don’t even care. I don’t even listen. I don’t even believe in God.”
I said, “You’re going to go because you’re going to connect to your culture and your people, and you’re going to go, and you’ll try to get something out of it. And when you’re older, you’ll understand.”
You know what happened? She went, and a couple of hours later, I found out she was talking to her mother about the sermon the rabbi gave that was very interesting to her.
But she was kicking and screaming all the way there.
That’s an interesting thing to look at. As we go through the season, we may actually see that some of the ways that Amy’s being patient and kind and soft may actually end up backfiring on her; she may actually end up overcompensating in a way that leaves her exposed to problems.
It seems like that could create an interesting conflict, especially as Amy and Sonya begin to see things from each other’s perspectives and help them understand each other more.
That’s one of the reasons that we chose the parent-kid dynamic in the case as the first episode. That moment where Michael says, “You always thought that the kids were being asked to take it on because the adults couldn’t do the right thing.” It’s an interesting time right now.
The case in the premiere really brought that idea home. The amount of drills kids have to go through now is insane.
I think, for me, the closest we came to drills like that growing up was post-9/11, and now kids are doing them constantly because of school shootings. That is a lot of trauma.
Can you imagine? I mean, that’s what my kids go to school, and I can’t believe the number of times that they put them through this. Yeah. I mean, that’s what inspired me, you know, was just, you know, and how normalized it is.
Like six, seven, eight times a year, you pretend that there’s a shooter in the building.
Right? Where you’re trying to be desensitized to that. But clearly, your body knows better.
How can that be psychologically healthy? Yeah. I have my own very strong opinions, you know, about that.
Turning to Jake, I really thought he was going to go into Peds. His reasoning for not wanting to made sense, though, and now we see him shifting into cardio.
Now Amy and Jake have to navigate their relationship when they’ve broken up, while she’s also having these memories of what their relationship was like before. What can you tease about that? They’re always so messy!
I know. Well, I mean, Amy made kind of an impetuous decision at the end of last season to just kind of, like, “I see him going; I see that he seems to have some feelings for his ex-wife. This is making me very uncomfortable. I don’t like this.”
And remember, he lied a little bit when she had the cancer scare, and that got her feeling kind of jealous and rejected. So what’s interesting is, we know that when Amy gets threatened or scared or vulnerable or feels that on some level she’s been betrayed, she puts up walls very quickly and protects herself and runs.
Either she shuts down and protects herself, or she protects herself and runs, or some combination. And so I think we’re seeing that we’re seeing that pattern repeat, you know, with Jay. The second that she smells, there may be a complication with Rachel.
She just goes, ” Oh, that’s where you belong. I think this was a bad idea.”
She tells him it’s about him, but maybe it’s about her, or maybe it’s just about her being uneasy, sitting in, not feeling safe. And we will be exploring this season in flashbacks, her deeper history in her childhood and where that comes from, which will be really, really cool and interesting.
We’ll understand this is like a seminal thing that she’s going to have to overcome in any version of herself.
Old Amy, new Amy, renewed Amy, hybrid Amy. There are certain things that are baked into her past and how she functions that she’ll have to confront. So, yeah, in the first few episodes, she’s sort of haunted by Jake being there.
She intellectually made the right choice, I think. And then she might have some memories that make her second-guess that. So I would just say, you know, it ain’t over till it’s over.
Tune in to Doc on Tuesdays at 9/8c on FOX. And we’ll have you covered with full reviews!
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