He’s surly, tactless, self-centered, and uptight–but he’s the only doctor in town.

As a hard-charging London surgeon, Martin Ellingham (Martin Clunes, Men Behaving Badly) didn’t need a bedside manner. His patients were unconscious, so he could be as rude and arrogant as he pleased. All that changes when he develops a crippling fear of blood and is forced to give up surgery. Now a GP in a sleepy, picturesque Cornish fishing village, Doc Martin offends everyone in town, including the one person he wants to impress, beautiful teacher Louisa Glasson (Caroline Catz, Murder in Suburbia). Getting her attention proves even more difficult when Louisa’s old flame returns to the village and becomes his new rival.

Martin Clunes shines in this award-winning comic drama set amid eccentric townsfolk and spectacular scenery. As the doctor says, “It’s good to be loathsome.”

DVD FEATURES INCLUDE photo gallery and cast filmographies.Throughout the eight episodes comprising the second series of Doc Martin, the cold, severe Doctor Martin Ellingham (Martin Clunes) may not get too much friendlier but he does reveal, in the oddest ways, his affinities for people he truly cares about. As a man who, in the first series, was kicked out of London back to his hometown, Portwenn, a remote Cornish fishing village, Doc Martin is set-up as a bitter medicine man who cures with his brain instead of his heart. In the first episode, “Old Dogs,” Martin’s confidence is undermined by two cases he solves incorrectly. First, his mother’s friend, Mrs. Steel (Margaret Tyzack), grows senile while Martin believes she is fine with tragic results. Weirder is the tale of fisherman Eddie, who continually comes to Martin’s office with cuts, bruises, and worse. While Martin searches for clues in this episode as well as in the subsequent few, the gripping medical mysteries are leavened by humor introduced through petty town gossip. Whether in line at the grocery, or walking to work, Martin is accosted by curious townsfolk who probe him and seek his advice, to his chagrin. The show illustrates small-town life, in the tradition of American classics Northern Exposure and Twin Peaks, and in fact shares some of its more bizarre plots with Lynch’s.

In this second series, other characters become central to the community’s movement, and the quiet, friendly demeanors of others offset Martin’s gruffness. “In Loco” focuses on the local primary school, where Martin’s crush, the beautiful brunette, Louisa Glasson (Caroline Catz), prepares to interview for a headmaster position while an outbreak of an infectious disease spreads like wildfire through the student population. Teenager Peter (Curtis O’Brien), whose mother burns herself frying fish in the fish ‘n’ chips shop, attaches himself to Martin as a stand-in father figure. More, the grungy dog pawing his way into Martin’s house is the carrier of this dread illness. Throughout the series, one sees Martin attempting to connect to women, children, and animals, with minimal success, minus a few miracles. His jovial receptionist, Pauline Lamb (Katherine Parkinson), shakes her head and occasionally cracks a joke at his attempts. In “Erotomania,” Martin even tries to bond with Police Constable Mark Mylow (Stewart Wright), who suffers when he discovers that his fiancé, Julie Mitchell (Angeline Ball), is not who she claims to be. Ultimately, Doc Martin is about the dramas of small-town health, the ways people connect, but more interestingly, the ways people isolate to maintain semblances of privacy in places where there is little. –Trinie Dalton

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