By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher
JAN. 20, 2026 | Fox Television is offering a new streaming show called Best Medicine. The eight-part series airs Sunday night, with the fourth part to be shown on Jan. 25.
It is a re-make of the highly entertaining PBS program of a few years back, Doc Martin. The Fox version steals virtually most everything from the PBS version, even being filmed in the same English coastal village, though the new story location has moved to a fictional town in Maine. But it goes even farther….taking the thrust of the story, the names of most of the characters, an incompetent office associate, even the romances of the PBS version. The new authors of the script have simply plagiarized the old version in its entirety. If the original writers of the script didn’t get compensated from FOX Television, they should sue for infringement of copyright. It’s that obvious.
Hollywood has for years made new versions of old films. We’ve certainly seen enough versions of Murder on the Orient Express. But while the main story in most of these has not been so outright stolen, still these new versions were entertaining without being so obvious.
Not Best Medicine. It simply has too many coincidences. And to those of us who remember the Doc Martin series at least with admirable characters, the Best Medicine version seems cold and indifferent.
Bad language: Don’t know about you, but when young, one of the worst things you could do was use bad language. Or else you would immediately earn the ire of your family. It wasn’t tolerated.
The entertainment industry has certainly brought foul language to stories. Perhaps the start of it was when at the very end of Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler turned to Scarlett O’Hara and said: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” That was particularly powerful as it was the last spoken line in the movie. People walked out of theatres having endured the long movie, but the ending set tongues wagging.
We watched another relatively new movie recently where two particular foul words were used over and over. It was as if every sentence from every character needed this particular punch. These “cuss words” came not just from one or two characters in the movie, but from regular people to those in high executive suites with their coats and ties on. Over and over, from men and women. For no useful reason.
We’re not just talking about polite society not using those two words. People in everyday life don’t talk like this. You might find a few people in the regular work force occasionally, when something significantly bad happens, to offer a ‘Dammit-it-all” or “What the hell?” But you don’t hear this in every other moment. Polite and everyday society just doesn’t talk like that. Most people are not so crude.
Bad language has always been around, but not so prevalent as today. Back in the mid 1970s, we attended a movie in Buford, The Front Page, about a big-city newsroom. We were shocked at the continued use of cuss words from everyone on that newspaper. We remember thinking that when I was on a big-city newspaper staff, people did not pop out bad language in sentence after sentence.
Years later, I saw that same movie on television. However, this time the cuss words had been edited out. And I remember thinking: the movie was better by taking out the bad language. The story moved better without that detraction.
You might like the new Doc Martin look-alike on Fox. We don’t. And we suspect many people don’t approve of continued useless foul language of the entertainment industry.
- Have a comment? Click here to send an email.
