Fox is finally bringing everyone back to Port Wenn — but Best Medicine fans should expect a “devastating” revelation amid season 2 shakeups.
During Us‘ visit to the Best Medicine set, executive producer Rodney Ferrell teased where season 2 starts out, saying, “We’ll see how long Eden remains in town. We’ll see how this new romance with Louisa pans out. Mark is going to have some hanky panky with some characters you know.”
Ferrell hinted that every character would face ups and downs.
“Martin is going to get better at the blood phobia but then something very major is going to happen that is going to regress him backwards in a big way,” he hinted. “So that’s coming. And then something pretty devastating is going to happen to one of our characters.”
Despite the concerning warning, Ferrell promised that Port Wenn would always find a way to come back from the challenges.
“[Don’t be] that worried. But it’s going to be a scary moment,” he hinted. “And there might even be a moment of medical attention for Copernicus [the dog] that might need to be dealt with. … [But] nothing’s going to happen that we’re not going to want to watch.”
Best Medicine follows a doctor who moves from Boston to a small practice in the East Coast fishing village where he vacationed as a child. In addition to Josh Charles, the cast includes Josh Segarra, Abigail Spencer, Cree Cicchino, Annie Potts, Didi Conn, Clea Lewis, Stephen Spinella, Jason Veasey, Cindy De La Cruz, John DiMaggio, Carter Shimp and dog Wattson.
“We learned a lot in season 1. I think what we learned was about finding the right balance between comedy, finding the real emotion, finding the drive with the medical cases,” Ferrell explained. “So I think this season you’re going to find a lot of episodes having a lot more emotion in them and going places with each character emotionally that we didn’t explore before.”
Ferrell saw each experience as a lesson, adding, “Because I feel like we discovered that the show can handle that along with the comedy, along with the medical cases. So I think that’s the big difference this season.”
Creator Liz Tuccillo was also thrilled to see the series adapt.
“Just having the room to tell the amount of stories that you want because you just feel like you have these great actors and you want them all to have big stories in every episode and you can’t. So that’s the challenge [this season],” she noted. “Finding ways to feel like you’ve really touched in with everybody for a season, and then they’ve all had growth and they’ve all had an arc while sort of doing all the other things you have to.”
Ferrell spoke to Us as well about the challenges behind the scenes, adding, “Tone is always the hardest thing for a show like this because you’re constantly treading the balance of, ‘Is it funny enough?’ But does the medical cases feel legitimate enough? Is there a real threat? But also having fun around that so it never gets too serious that you can’t have fun.”
He continued: “This year we’re trying to sort of implement a little more urgency with the medical cases, even having multiple medical cases and episodes. So I think our challenge is constantly making sure that we don’t lose the fun tone and that everyone’s sort of tuning into, the quirkiness of the characters, because sometimes those cases can start to override and take over. So I think maintaining the tone of what everyone loved is our biggest challenge. We’re doing it but it’s a constant thing we’re watching.”
The one thing that will never change is the cases.
“That’s so funny because we’re in the middle of development so I have so many in my head. But the good thing is with all of our medical consultants, they all stem from real things,” Ferrell noted. “But then we’re a fictional show so we take creative liberty to sort of. There’s some memory loss coming.”
Best Medicine airs Tuesdays on Fox at 8 p.m. ET.
