All Bachelor viewers have been in this situation at 10:01 p.m.: The rose ceremony disperses, the bloopers roll, and Dr. Shaun Murphy scrubs in to cause some soap-opera-level shit in the ICU. Or maybe the chaos occurred earlier, at 9:04 p.m., when a commercial teased how that horny weirdo was arguing with his besieged hospital employees. This is, of course, just another week of Bachelor Nation being dunk-tanked into the world of The Good Doctor, the ABC drama starring Freddie Highmore that will gurney itself away to another night on the network’s schedule for its seventh and final season. Until now, the show had aired directly after a Bachelor program on Monday night, allowing reality-television fans to unwittingly absorb the doctor’s exploits in those precious, outrageously entertaining snippets. Sure, we could watch The Good Doctor on Tuesday if so inclined. But we won’t. That’s not the point. Checking in with Dr. Shaun Murphy has become our post-Bachelor ritual, and now that it’s over, we must memorialize our man.
I challenged myself to summarize the arc of Highmore’s surgeon based on what I’ve gleaned throughout the years, and here’s what I’ve come up with:
Wow, he pisses off a lot of people at this hospital.
He’s on the spectrum and has a lot of sex … in the workplace. Is that allowed?
He has a girlfriend! I guess that’s nice.
Never mind. I can’t believe two women — three women? — are fighting over this schmuck.
Wait, when did the Good Doctor get married?
THE GOOD DOCTOR IS A FATHER??
What is this young prodigy’s story? And how has he managed to make us care so much, even if only for a few minutes? I asked some of my fellow Bachelor Nation residents for their insights. “The Good Doctor to Bachelor Nation is the acquaintance from high school you still follow on Instagram and have no connection to, but refuse to unfollow because you find it comforting to check in on their life every once in a while,” Emma Gray, co-host of the podcast Love to See It, tells me. “You’re like, Oh, look, he got married and had a baby and got a new job. We’ll be sad to see our friend from high school go.” Emily Palmer Heller, Vulture’s recommendations editor and recapper, feels a similar kinship. “My relationship with Dr. Murphy is a sort of baffled affection,” she explains. “Like he’s my weird nephew who I keep getting weirder and weirder updates about and just sort of have to accept: ‘That’s our Shaun!’”
Our Shaun, who, it must be noted, has surprisingly robust amounts of sex. “I’ve seen a lot of the first two minutes of an episode, which is how I know that the Good Doctor fucks everyone at the hospital,” Gray explains. “The face is giving teenager, but the sex life is giving swinging 30-something bachelor.” Ali Barthwell, an Emmy-winning writer for Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and tenured recapper, is captivated by how he’s “always fucking” in the show’s opening moments. “His charming and bumbling search for love has so dominated my thoughts that I sometimes saw him as the second Bachelor and every week wondered who would be in his bed or office,” she says. “In one episode, his girlfriend asked him to join her in the shower and this man was so excited. I can do that?! His frankness about his own sex life was refreshing but also worrisome. I’m not saying I need my doctor to be a sexless being, but when he’s strolling over to the nurses’ station telling everyone he was late because he was getting freaky, we need to pull it back.” (I reached out to ABC to see if Highmore would comment on this very specific notoriety. I was declined.)
With The Good Doctor moving to Tuesday night for its final season, Bachelor Nation will miss the absurd tonal shift that bridges the two shows. (As Barthwell puts it: “Fun is over and it’s time to get ready for a Tuesday!”) But what six seasons of watching the first few minutes of the medical drama each week has taught us is that it really isn’t so thematically different from our favorite dating competition. “I picture Shaun as an orphan boy in a doctor’s coat, too large for him, standing in the middle of a hospital looking dejected,” Gray says. “I got so stuck on the fact that he seemed to be having so many romantic relationships when he looked 15 and didn’t have social skills. Is the bar this low for women? But then I realized, well, I did just watch The Bachelor, so I guess the answer is ‘yes.’” We can only hope Highmore shows up at Joey Graziadei’s live “After the Final Rose” episode, giving us the closure we so desperately crave. ABC, you have the chance to do the funniest thing possible.
