Not exactly what a woman wants to hear when she’s enduring a gruesome, blood-soaked labor. “I’m new to the area, I don’t know where anything is!” he admits. At one point, the Young Doctor discusses the hospital’s surrounding geography while trying to deliver a baby for the first time. It wisely understands that, in Russia, there’s not much difference between the two. It doesn’t just blur the line between comedy and tragedy. “But you will freeze to death.”Ĭo-written by two alumni from IFC’s underrated David Cross comedy The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, one of whom played “Officer Vagina” on that show, the tone is hilariously deadpan: Imagine Sweeney Todd, with slightly more jokes and about the same number of amputations by way of rusty tools. “It’s not that ridiculous, is it, for a man to travel to Petrovka?” the Young Doctor asks a nurse. And Radcliffe faces such comparisons with admirable good humor, considering that the characters often riff on the fact that he: a) stands almost a foot shorter than Hamm, even though they’re supposed to be the same person, and b) looks like a 12-year-old boy. (Young Doctor, pointing to the gnarly medical device that the Old Doctor is holding: “Careful, you could have an eye out!” Old Doctor, picking up an even gnarlier device: “No, that’s what this is for!”) Nobody can see or hear the Old Doctor except the Young Doctor, which makes for some clever farcical moments with the hospital’s stone-faced, round-bottomed nurses, who are constantly measuring the Young Doctor against his smarter, more impressively bearded predecessor, the comically named Leopold Leopoldovich. Based on an autobiographical short-story collection by the Soviet doctor-turned-writer Mikhail Bulgakov, the same crazy genius who gave us a talking, gun-slinging cat in The Master and Margarita, the series follows a Russian medical school graduate (Radcliffe) who’s whisked off in 1917 to a pre-Revolution village so tiny and drab, he jokes that “even letters don’t want to be sent there.” Fortunately, an older version of our hero (played by Hamm) has been sent back in time from Moscow in 1934 to coach his younger self through gruesome surgical procedures, prevent him from getting high on his own morphine supply, and deliver witty banter along the way.
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