Felicity Huffman makes her debut in the Tuesday, September 30, episode of Doc, and TV Insider has an exclusive first look at her first scene, with Dr. Joan Ridley surprising her friend and mentee, Dr. Amy Larsen (Molly Parker).
In our clip above, Amy’s asleep in an on-call room when Joan wakes her by pinching her nose. Amy’s surprised to see her, since she was supposed to be gone for two more weeks. But as Joan explains, five months was enough for Burma. She is surprised to see Amy at work the day after she was held hostage, however.
Amy, who knows Joan would do the same thing, says she’s not working. “I was just too tired to make it to the door.”
Joan then remarks she can’t even tell she was in a car wreck, and Amy shows her a scar on her head. “So, I guess you’re not jockeying for the old job just yet?” Joan checks. “Are you kidding? I’m an intern now,” Amy tells her. Watch the full sneak peek above for a look at Joan’s students and to see what she’s told them about Amy.
“Joan took this job to make this hospital the best hospital in the state, maybe the world. Amy is to Joan, David Beckham, and she wants Amy to get back to where she was,” Huffman told TV Insider. “Joan, the way [showrunners] Barbie [Kligman] and Hank [Steinberg] have written her is a rebel. I think she was in Doctors Without Borders. She was probably in Somalia when Black Hawk Down happened. She probably slept with one of the Rolling Stones.”
Steinberg shared with us, “Joan is a tough, old-school feminist, big believer in female empowerment and self-made and a really interesting, eccentric personality. She is double boarded in internal medicine and surgery and has traveled the world doing Doctors With Borders type of medicine, so she’s been all over the world, she’s extremely adventurous and sure of herself. She’s tough and exacting on the other doctors in a similar way to how Amy is, but she’s smoother with how she does it. So she’s a bit more carrot-and-stick, whereas Amy was kind of all stick. Amy learned and watched Joan, but she sort of took the stick part and didn’t take much of the carrot part in terms of how she worked with her staff.”
What’s your impression of Joan so far? Let us know in the comments section below.
Doc, Tuesdays, 9/8c, Fox