‘Doc’ Boss & Blair Underwood Explain Ben’s Confession
‘Doc’ Boss & Blair Underwood Explain Ben’s Confession
Meredith JacobsWed, September 30, 2026 at 2:00 AM UTC
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As Doc Season 3 Episode 2 shows us, there were sparks from the start for Amy (Molly Parker) and Ben (Blair Underwood), when they met four years ago at a conference. Now, in the present day, they’re working together in the hospital, and she doesn’t remember their relationship because of the car accident that took eight years of her memories. He comes clean… sort of. TV Insider spoke with Blair Underwood (watch the video above!) and executive producer Hank Steinberg about that and more. Warning: Spoilers for Doc Season 3 Episode 2 ahead!
After they team up to help a patient with antlers stuck in his chest, Ben admits to Amy that he wasn’t sure she was the same doctor she used to be. When she mentions her memory flashes, he tells her they had a “dalliance,” on and off, at conferences, and she did a preliminary review of his clinical trial as a courtesy. She asks how it ended, and he says there were no hard feelings. But there’s a quick flash of Ben saying he should’ve called after that last night in New York…
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First of all, how truthful was Ben being when he called it a “dalliance”? According to Underwood, he planned what he would say, should it come up.
“I think he thought a great deal about it,” he tells us in the video interview above. As for how serious it may have been, “I really don’t know. … I think there’s much more to their history.”
Adds Steinberg, “We have a feeling maybe it was more than a dalliance. And so he’s got an interesting line that he’s walking there with her.”
As for what happened in New York, that has not been filmed yet. “These are two very actually ethical doctors in terms of why they got into this business of saving lives and they take it very seriously. And there’s a great internal conflict, which I love about it. I think what makes a show work is the characters, it’s the internal emotions and behaviors,” says Underwood. “There’s an internal conflict in both of them with respect to what happened before and how they were able to overcome that — if they blame each other, if Amy blames Ben, if Ben blames Amy. All of that history we don’t know yet and that’s all layered underneath if they love each other or just were having fun together.”
Steinberg won’t even hint at what happened but promises, “It’ll be worth the wait when you finally get the payoff.”
With the flashbacks we’ve gotten so far, “we wanted to create, at the beginning, this very fun dynamic romance between two people, mature people at the peak of their professional powers, the peak of their personal empowerment, and who can spar and who can challenge each other intellectually and that sexy,” he continues. “It’s just a great way to show another color of her and then to really put a reflection on the before and after with her with her accident.”
In the premiere, Ben told the board that Amy wasn’t the draw that she used to be. Underwood says what he saw in Amy as they worked together to save a life changed that.
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“I think it did force him to take a second look at her. I mean, when he says she’s not the draw she used to be, it’s only because she’s been downgraded in her job description and title, but the intellect is there and I think the more time he spends with her, he sees that the medical knowledge has not waned at all,” he says.
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He adds, “He trusts her. I mean, she’s the best at what she does and he says that a number of times we’ve shot already and I think it’s clear. It’s unequivocal. She’s the best at what she does, so he’s going to trust her knowledge.” Steinberg raves about Parker and Underwood’s chemistry, calling it “off the charts. She could be like, ‘What would you like for dinner?’ ‘I’d like a steak.’ ‘Oh, really? I heard the potatoes are good here.’ And you’d be like, ‘OK, jump into bed already.’ They’re in different departments, so they’re going to come at the cases from different angles. They both always think they’re the smartest person in the room. Amy, once she finds out about their past, it’s going to be off balance. If she gets memories sprinkling in these small little nuggets, what does it mean? ‘What is he telling me? What is he not telling me?’ I think that makes for the dance between them to be quite delicious.”
Notably, when Ben tells Amy that Jake (Jon Ecker) is a great guy and he’s happy for her, she doesn’t tell him that they broke up. Steinberg says Amy was “taken off guard.”
“She’s not sure what to make of it, and I think somewhere in her mind, maybe she’s not quite done with Jake herself, and I think she’d also just rather not get into her stuff at the hospital,” he explains. “She doesn’t trust him in that moment either.”
Jake, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to be done with Amy either, given that he has yet to tell her he’s back with his ex-wife Rachel (Samantha Massell ) and the hesitance he seems to have when he goes home in this episode.
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“He definitely owes her a conversation, and that conversation may collide in Episode 3 with her starting to have second thoughts about what she’s done,” the EP teases.
“Jake’s a family guy and a guy who really doing the right thing is important,” Steinberg says, noting that his and Rachel’s relationship is “complicated,” given their history. “They dated since college, and so they were each other’s first love, but they’ve been up and down, volatile breakups, all the things that are baked into a relationship that was formed when people were not so mature. And it’s interesting, even when you get older, you can’t redo the DNA of your relationship in a way; even when you’re now 35, 37, the way that you are with that person since 18, 19, it’s hard to undo the patterns. And so the question is, and I think that’s the nature of his ambivalence about it, that there’s a deep love for Rachel, but it’s a flawed relationship that’s had its ups and downs.”
He continues, “She betrayed him. He has a hard time forgiving her for that. He knows he had some culpability in that, he learns, but he definitely wants to wake up every day with his daughter, and it’s something that makes sense on paper. And that may be one of his flaws, because he’s a pretty solid, great guy, [has] a need for stability, a need for monogamy, and wanting to do the right thing and be the good guy that can maybe not give him permission to go after something that might be more self-serving or in his own heart or what have you.”
Watch the video above for more from Blair Underwood.
Doc, Tuesdays, 9/8c, Fox
Watch the full video on TV Insider.
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
