Over a decade ago, as we watched some long-forgotten show in the common room of our residential theme house in undergrad, I saw a trailer that lodged inside my head with remarkable persistence. Daniel Radcliffe, at the time just spreading his acting wings apart from the Harry Potter franchise, starred as a young Russian doctor, and through some narrative conceit his older self, played by John Hamm, interacted with the young doctor in real time. It looked like what could be a delightful dark comedy, and while I never remembered the name of the show, I would often remember it briefly, only to forget again. This year, however, the stars aligned; not only did I remember when in search of a new show to watch, I successfully tracked it down to one of our current steaming services and settled in to watch.
A Young Doctor’s Notebook was almost exactly what I remembered about it. In the 1930s and under investigation by Soviet authorities for abusing morphine prescriptions, Dr. Vladimir Bomgard finds his old notebook and reflects on his happier, simpler life as a young man. Fresh from graduating at the top of his medical school class in Moscow, Bomgard found himself sent to a remote hospital in the middle of Siberia as his first real assignment. The first season deals primarily with the resulting fish-out-of-water experience as the young doctor, and the audience, is introduced to the quirky but ultimately harmless busybodies with whom he will be working for the foreseeable future, all while realizing that his prodigious book learning has not prepared him for the practical execution of medicine in a rural peasant community. Meanwhile, the older Bomgard faces more intense scrutiny of his morphine habits, resulting in his arrest and the loss of his medical license.
It is with the show’s second season that I found much more satisfying historical meat to sink my teeth into. The roles of the two Bomgards reverse, with Hamm playing a detoxed elder self and Radcliffe fast descending into the throws of morphine dependency. While the first season took place concurrently with the Russian Revolution of 1917, the second occurs amidst the ensuing Civil War between communist Red and anti-communist White Russian forces. Both sides seesaw back and forth through the area, each commandeering the hospital at different times and forcing the staff to change their professed allegiance and ideology appropriately. The Whites are also shown quite accurately, and humorously, to be much more concerned with their own creature comforts and frivolous niceties than actually doing anything to win the war. As it so happened, I had just finished reading a history of Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, and so was in a unique position to appreciate the atmospheric storytelling of this back half of the show, and was unsurprised to learn that the series had been based on the semi-autobiographical short stories of Mikhail Bulgakov.
All that said, however, A Young Doctor’s Notebook never really reached a point of enjoyment higher than “mildly pleasant” for me. It was not uproariously funny, and on the whole I found Radcliffe’s Young Bomgard to be insufferably unsympathetic in a way that, while likely intended for his characterization, made the show hard to really get invested in. Hamm’s moments of pathos (and bathos) as Bomgard’s older self were touching to watch, but too few and far between, with too little further resolution, to balance things out. For those in search of any kind of visual material depicting the Russian Civil War, it can certainly serve decently well, but don’t expect grand things.