Fall 2011 Review: Hart of Dixie

13 Oct

Unforgettable was exactly what I thought it would be, and so is Hart of Dixie, but as a very different type of show.  I’ll talk about the premise in more detail below, but I can pretty much sum it up like this:  big-city-super-educated-doctor-girl moves into small-hick-southern town, learns that the people there aren’t so bad after all.

That’s basically all I need to get across the main gist of the show.  That said, here’s a little bit of a longer version.  Rachel Bilson portrays Dr. Zoe Hart (yes, let’s spend a second on the literalness of the pun in the title, Saving Grace and others like it have a successor), a high-powered doctor whose had her whole life planned out since she was a kid. She wanted to be like her dad and become a Cardio-thoracic surgeon, working with him in his practice.  She is shocked when she doesn’t get the fellowship she needs because, as she learns, she doesn’t have the people skills needed to be a top doctor.  The person who grants the fellowships tells her to get some practice as a general practitioner, and then come back and reapply.  Meanwhile, she has had a strange outstanding offer from a general practitioner in a small Alabama town, a Harvey Wilkes, to come down to his practice and help out.  She takes him up on the offer, only to find out when she gets there that he died recently, but left his half of his practice to her.  She then has a number of City Slickers moments, meeting the (main) characters of the town and not fitting in everywhere, and she feels alienated.  Her mother comes down begging her to leave, and she is planning on it, until she is forced to help deliver a pregnancy at a wedding, and also finds out that Harvey Wilkes was her true biological father.  She then decides to stay and learn about her biological father and about being a general practitioner and about growing as a person.

Okay, so the simple explanation was probably just as useful as the long one in determining what kind of show it is, but that doesn’t say whether or not it’s good.  Like Unforgettable, I think part of it is just whether the type of show appeals to you, in particular because I think the show was nothing notably good or notably bad.  I liked Rachel Bilson more than I thought I would, and I do think she has the charm and likeability to carry a show, and I enjoyed Scott Porter (Jason Street from Friday Night Lights) speaking with a southern accent.  If you like the actors, and you like a little fluffy drama with some probable light soapiness,  you’ll probably like the show.  It’s not close to can’t miss television though.

Will I watch it again?  No, I won’t.  There just isn’t enough going on.  There’s nothing wrong with it, per se; it’s not bad.  It’s just not that interesting either.  It’s cute and it’s light and I appreciate the draw of shows like that but I already watch a couple that satisfy that sector for me.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: