How Daniel Dae Kim helped to make The Good Doctor a hit

The Good Doctor is at the moment the biggest runaway hit of the fall TV season, and the funny story is that at one point, it was almost not on the air at all.

While you can credit showrunner David Shore and series star Freddie Highmore for making the series as successful as it is critically and commercially right now, you have to take this story back all the way to Daniel Dae Kim to better understand how it got to this point. Kim was a fan of the original Korean version of the show, and after starting up a production company at CBS Television Studios — where he was at the time thanks to Hawaii Five-0 — he tried to get the show on the air during two separate development cycles, but it was turned away both times. As a matter of fact, the actor went so far as to buy the rights to the series back from the studio so that he could shop it around elsewhere. This eventually led to him teaming up with Shore and getting a pilot made through Sony Pictures TV over at ABC — who clearly loved the show and wanted it on the air.

In speaking about the process in a new pieces with TV Guide, Kim had the following to say:

“I’m incredibly grateful to CBS for giving me the opportunity to start a production company. I was really hoping that I could bring something back to my home studio and The Good Doctor was the first project that my company developed, so I was disappointed that it wasn’t the right fit for them at the time.”

What made the success of The Good Doctor all the more exciting was that nobody really saw it coming. Critics were mixed on the show from the start, but we feel like one of the things that many of them out there really failed to understand was just how desperate much of the country was for an optimistic show. Much of the reason for the success of The Good Doctor was that it was a show they could watch and feel happy about at the end. How many other shows out there are like that in this climate? It’s inspirational, and of course it is anchored by a fantastic performance from Freddie Highmore. If he wasn’t a star already thanks to Bates Motel this would almost certainly be it.

The Good Doctor is currently on hiatus, but if you head over to the link here you can read more in terms of when the series is coming back.

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