Doc: When House Forgot His Past Eight Years and Woke Up in Minneapolis
Fox’s Doc is part medical drama, part memory puzzle — and almost entirely a déjà vu diagnosis of House, M.D.
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Television has never been shy about recycling its own DNA, but Fox’s new medical drama Doc is the rare case where the patient file is still warm from its predecessor. Premiering in January 2025 on Fox, Doc follows Dr. Amy Larsen (Molly Parker), the Chief of Internal Medicine at a Minneapolis hospital, who loses the last eight years of her memory after a car accident and must reconstruct her life, career, and bedside manner from scratch.
The premise is lifted from the Italian hit Doc – Nelle tue mani, itself inspired by the real story of Dr. Pierdante Piccioni, a physician who lost over a decade of memory after a traumatic brain injury. But for American audiences, the real déjà vu doesn’t come from Milan. It comes from Princeton-Plainsboro.
Amnesia in a Lab Coat
Before her accident, Amy was cold, callous, and emotionally hollowed out by the death of her son. She barked at colleagues, cut through patient lies with surgical precision, and carried the same moral frostbite that defined House, M.D.’s Gregory House. After the accident, she’s vulnerable, empathetic, and fumbling like a resident in her own life.
In effect, Doc splits House’s personality in two: Amy before is House at peak misanthropy, Amy after is House post-Vicodin detox with a therapist’s phone number taped to the fridge.
It’s a clever twist — but then the cases start rolling in.
The Case Files: Spot the Clone
The surest way to see Doc’s House-shaped shadow is to line up the diagnoses:
Leptospirosis (Pilot): Amy solves a farmer’s mystery illness by visiting his workplace. House’s first season used the same structure — environmental clue, rare infection, smug doctor’s victory.
CIPA (Insensitive Teen): Doc trots out Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis, the same rare disorder House diagnosed in Season 3’s “Insensitive.” Both come with the philosophical garnish: pain is essential to life.
CPS Custody Battle: Amy squares off against Child Protective Services over a parent’s medical decision. House did nearly identical arcs, including parents refusing treatment for religious reasons.
The Diver with the Bends: Amy saves a scuba diver with decompression sickness. House solved the same bends mystery — twice.
Hostage Situation: Doc opens Season 2 with a gunman in the ICU. House had “Euphoria,” a two-parter with the same setup, down to the sweating patients and frantic monitors.
And these aren’t isolated coincidences. They form a pattern: Doc isn’t just influenced by House; it’s practically auditing House reruns with a notepad.
The “Everybody Lies” Doctrine
The clearest theft is philosophical. House’s mantra was “Everybody lies.” He treated deception as the heart of diagnosis. Doc hands Amy the same skillset in flashbacks: pre-accident, she’s sharp enough to catch patients lying mid-sentence.
The difference is context: House’s cynicism came from chronic pain and Vicodin abuse; Amy’s came from grief over her son’s death.
In other words, the cynic is trauma-born, not drug-borne. But the result is indistinguishable in practice: both doctors roll their eyes at patient testimony and solve cases by uncovering hidden truths.
The Love Quadrilateral
If House ran on sharp insults and suppressed sexual tension, Doc runs on what can only be described as a love quadrilateral:
Amy and her ex-husband Michael (Omar Metwally).
Amy and Jake (Jon Ecker), the younger resident fling.
Amy and Joan Ridley (Felicity Huffman), her mentor-turned-nemesis in Season 2.
The geometry is dizzying. House had triangles; Doc escalates to polygons.
Themes: Who Are You Without Your Worst Years?
Here’s where Doc earns its own diagnosis. House was about whether brilliance excused cruelty. Doc asks: if grief made you cruel, and amnesia stripped that away, which self is the “real” one? Are you defined by your worst years, or do you get a second chance when memory loss hits the reset button?
Every patient case becomes a metaphor for Amy herself — treating scuba divers who forget their safety stops, parents who forget medical advice, teens who can’t feel pain. The show is strongest when it leans into this mirroring.
Reception: A Painless Watch
Critics are split. Rotten Tomatoes pegs Doc’s first season at 44% approval, Metacritic shrugs with a 58, and reviewers describe it as “painless,” “safe,” and occasionally “clunky.” Yet Fox doubled down with a 22-episode Season 2 order, rare faith in a broadcast drama these days. Clearly, the network thinks audiences want House 2.0, memory edition.
The Comparative Syllabus
For the obsessive viewer, here’s the watch guide:
Doc S1E1 (Pilot) ↔ House S1E3 Occam’s Razor (Leptospirosis).
Doc CIPA episode ↔ House S3E14 Insensitive.
Doc CPS episode ↔ House S2E10 Failure to Communicate.
Doc Diver episode ↔ House S2E2 Autopsy.
Doc S2E1 Hostage ↔ House S2E20 Euphoria (Parts 1 & 2).
Pair them like wine and cheese, except the aftertaste is déjà vu.
Final Diagnosis
Doc is haunted by two ghosts: the son Amy lost, and the ghost of Gregory House. It borrows entire case files, philosophies, and even dramatic setups. But its one act of originality is profound: by splitting House into “before” and “after,” Doc makes its protagonist both monster and redemption arc.
If House was about refusing to change, Doc is about what happens when change is forced upon you by memory loss.
Whether that’s enough to escape House’s shadow is debatable. But if you’ve ever wondered what House would look like if he woke up in Minneapolis with eight years missing and a better haircut, Doc is your answer.
Doc is American television’s own patient file — a drama that forgets what it aired fifteen years ago, rewrites the symptoms in Molly Parker’s chart, and diagnoses itself with a chronic case of House-itis, treated only with empathy, memory gaps, and a network’s undying need for reruns in disguise.