Season 1
Synopsis
A Young Doctor's Notebook (2012), Season 1 — watch online on iFILM: four episodes of BBC Two's dark comedy drawn from Mikhail Bulgakov's autobiographical stories. Two actors, one man, two timelines.
Daniel Radcliffe plays the young Bomgard in 1917 — fresh out of university and posted to a snowbound village hospital with no backup. Childbirth, amputation, syphilis: the caseload does not ease him in gently. Jon Hamm plays the same man in 1934, recalling those months from a chair in a government office, watching his younger self flounder with something between scorn and reluctant sympathy. Across the four episodes the morphine Bomgard first reached for to keep himself functional quietly shifts into something harder to put down.
What makes Season 1 work is the Radcliffe-Hamm double act: the two perform the same character at different stages of collapse, and the dynamic between them turns a compact four-episode run into something worth returning to. Stream A Young Doctor's Notebook Season 1 online on iFILM.
4 episodes
S1·E1Episode 1
A doctor finds his old diary while answering to the authorities about self-prescribing morphine. He has a series of comic exchanges with his young and inexperienced self, mocking him for his youthful looks and guiding him through his early difficulties on the job.
S1·E2Episode 2
The inexperienced younger doctor is forced to carry out the operation of his career. His older self does little to ease his nerves.
S1·E3Episode 3
In spite of his success in the operating room, life in the snow-bound hospital begins to take its toll on the young doctor. His efforts to combat his feelings of boredom and isolation are defeated and he wonders how much longer he can last. Nursing abdominal pains and two harrowing cases, the young doctor is tempted by the allure of morphine...
S1·E4Episode 4
Balancing a heavy workload with a developing morphine habit, the young doctor finds it increasingly difficult to conceal his burgeoning addiction from his colleagues. After one humiliation too many, he resolves to make a clean start and a dedicated effort to combat the syphilis epidemic. But a blizzard-bound journey to visit a dying patient proves to be his toughest test yet.
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