Being a member of the Gouldsboro select board and a former newspaper reporter, Jacqueline Weaver was pretty curious when she heard the setting for a new Fox TV show was inspired by her town, specifically the tiny fishing village of Corea.

So she watched the first episode of “Best Medicine,” which premiered Jan. 4, with a critical eye. While the show’s harbor town did not look much like Corea to her — it was filmed on the Hudson River north of New York City — she felt it could certainly pass for a Maine harbor town. But what impressed Weaver was that the show’s town had the same feel as hers: Everyone knows everyone and the town’s reluctant new doctor cannot find any place to be alone, no matter how hard he tries.

“I think they captured the feel of the town, a small town where you can’t get away from each other, in a good way,” said Weaver, who moved to Gouldsboro about 20 years ago and was a reporter for the Ellsworth American. “I moved here from Connecticut because I wanted to feel like part of a community. In the winter, a big crowd at the supermarket is six people. “

“Best Medicine” is based on the hit British TV show “Doc Martin,” about a socially awkward doctor made queasy by the sight of blood, forced to move from the big city to a small coastal town full of quirky characters. The show’s executive producer and showrunner, Liz Tuccillo, says she based the show’s version of a Maine town on Corea, after visiting there and talking to locals for flavor and story ideas. She also met with Jean Symonds, a retired nursing professor who fished for lobsters out of Corea Harbor for decades, and based a character in the show on her. Some episode storylines include baked bean suppers and browntail moths.

Tuccillo had spent some time with friends in Portland during the pandemic and decided she might like to set “Best Medicine” in a coastal Maine village. Her Maine friends recommended Corea, east of Acadia National Park. The village is one of several in Gouldsboro, a town of about 1,700 people.

“I spent my childhood summers in a few very small towns in Iowa, which I have fond memories of, but ultimately I wanted (“Best Medicine”) to feel similar to the original “Doc Martin” and be by water and have those amazing views,” Tuccillo wrote in an email to the Press Herald.

The show stars Josh Charles as the reluctant doctor, Martin Best, and Annie Potts as his aunt Sarah, a 70-something woman who fishes for lobsters. Charles starred in the ABC series “Sports Night” and the CBS series “The Good Wife,” while Potts’ extensive film and TV credits include the CBS series “Young Sheldon” and “Designing Women.” New episodes air Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on Fox and stream on Fox One and Hulu.

Though there have been dozens of TVs shows and films set in Maine, it’s rare that a writer or producer names a specific town as inspiration. One, of course, is Stephen King, who has mentioned his hometown of Bangor and other locales as inspiring the towns in his stories adapted for the screen. At least eight Hallmark Christmas movies have been set in completely fictional Maine towns, including “Novel Noel” in 2024, which takes place largely at a bookstore in the charming, made-up town of St. Ives.

Maybe the best-known and most stereotypical depiction of Maine was on the hit CBS show “Murder, She Wrote,” starring Angela Lansbury, in the 1980s and ’90s. Set in the fictional Maine town of Cabot Cove, Lansbury played an author who solved a murder a week with the help of locals vying for the title of “Worst Maine Accent.” It was one of the 10 most-watched shows on network television for much of its 12-year run.

“Best Medicine” opens with some actual shots of Maine, including Portland Head Light in Cape Elizabeth, before shifting to the action in the fictional town of Port Wenn, Maine. (It was called Portwenn in “Doc Martin”) In the first episode, there’s a character who, dissatisfied with the town doctor, says he can find a better physician in Bar Harbor. There’s also a reference to the local restaurant having the best lobster roll in northeast Maine instead of Down East Maine, which is how most folks there would likely describe the region.

But locals who’ve seen the show say it stays away from the “Ayuh, can’t get theah from heah” stereotypes of Mainers and (thankfully) away from trying to replicate the Maine accent. But several said the look of Port Wenn on screen is more manicured than most Maine villages, thanks to filming locales in towns like Cornwall and New Hamburg, some 90 minutes north of New York City on the Hudson River.

“It depicts Maine in a more glamorous way, with pleasure craft, while here you see fishing boats in the harbor,” said Sharon Newman, who has a home in Winter Harbor, which borders Gouldsboro. “We did have a general store, but it was lot more bare bones than the one in the series.”

Newman says she likes the show and will continue watching. Her late husband, Benjamin Newman, was the only practicing physician in Winter Harbor for several years, referred to by some locals as “the village doc.” He treated a lot of fishermen and would sometimes accept lobsters as payment. When she and her husband first watched “Doc Martin,” which began airing in the United States around 2008, they couldn’t believe the similarities between the show and their own lives. Her husband died in 2024.

“We rented an old house and converted the downstairs into an office, just like in the show. I often thought our life was like a cross between ‘Doc Martin’ and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,'” said Newman.

Shows set in Maine are rarely filmed here, mostly because states like New York and Massachusetts offer much richer financial incentives to filmmakers. Tuccillo credited production designer Diane Lederman with making two Hudson River towns credible stand-ins for Maine, with a combination of shot selection and some selective CGI.

“As for the water views, we hope to give the feel that the town is in an inlet that goes out into the ocean, to help sell river for ocean,” Tucillo wrote to the Press Herald. “But we have been very diligent in making sure it didn’t look like a river with the shots we used, the locations we chose and little magical CGI tricks.”

 When Tuccillo started researching Corea, the first people she spoke to were Barry Canner and Bob Travers, who had run the Black Duck Inn there. They had a pet pig for a time, named Dolly Bacon. In the show, the two owners of a dockside restaurant have a pet pig as well, named Brisket.

Tuccillo also met Symonds, who later had a Zoom meeting with Potts, so Potts could research her character. Symonds passed away in August, at the age of 92.

“It’s amazing that she (Symonds) had the chance to meet on Zoom with Annie Potts,” said Canner. “She (Potts) asked terrific, intelligent questions.”

Debbie Painter, whose family has a seasonal home in Gouldsboro, thinks the show’s harbor is believable as a Maine locale. But unlike some area residents, Painter wishes at least some of the actors in the show would try to put on a Maine accent.

“I love hearing it (the Maine accent) and so it bothers me that we don’t hear it in the show,” said Painter, who lives most of the year in Union County, New Jersey. “I know there are some parts of Maine that don’t have it, but where this is supposed to be, there should be somebody with an accent.”

Despite that, Painter said she’d continue watching the show “because it’s supposed to be set in an area I love.”