TV Talk: Pitt, CMU grad reboots ‘Doogie Howser, M.D.’ for Disney+

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Veteran TV writer and University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University grad Kourtney Kang knows the bad rap reboots get among critics and some viewers. She purposefully took a different, more personal approach to writing a “Doogie Howser, M.D.” reboot.

“We joke on the show that for a ‘Doogie Howser’ reboot, this show is oddly personal because it’s very much my family,” said Kang, whose past credits include “How I Met Your Mother,” which starred the original Doogie, Neil Patrick Harris.

Like ABC’s original “Doogie” (1989-93), “Doogie Kamealoha, M.D.,” streaming Wednesday on Disney+, is a family-friendly coming of age story that follows a 16-year-old doctor. This time Doogie is a Hawaiian girl, Lahela Doogie Kamealoha (Peyton Elizabeth Lee, “Andi Mack”), and the setting is Oahu.

Beyond the show’s premise, the particulars come from Kang’s own life, allowing her to fulfill her dream of writing a show about her own family. Kang was born in Hawaii, her father grew up in Hawaii and is of Korean ancestry and her mom is of Irish descent from northern Pennsylvania.

On the new show, Doogie’s mom (Kathleen Rose Perkins, “Episodes”) is of Irish descent and from suburban Philadelphia, where Kang grew up, and Doogie’s dad (Jason Scott Lee, “Mulan”) is Hawaiian and of Chinese descent. Just like Kang, Doogie has two brothers.

As far as connecting this series to the original, Kang took a more relaxed approach. When executive producers Melvin Mar and Jake Kasdan, with whom she’d worked on ABC’s “Fresh Off the Boat,” approached her about developing the show their only pitch was “Doogie Howser reboot with an Asian girl at the center.”

“I was like, I think that’s great, but how is it a reboot? Is she related?” Kang said in a recent phone interview. “One of the challenges of reboots is you have to in the first five minutes of the show fill everybody in on what’s happened in the last 25 years. The show is burdened with this exposition. How do you get around that?”

Her elegant solution: Avoid it almost altogether.

“What if it takes place in our world, in a world where ‘Doogie Howser’ is just a show from the ‘90s, and (her colleagues) call her Doogie,” Kang explained. “It’s just her nickname.”

Opening credits for the new “Doogie” ape the look and timing of the original with the same theme song now performed by world renowned ukulele player Jake Shimabukuro. But don’t expect the original Doogie to show up in season one. Kang tried but Neil Patrick Harris, who lives in New York, was booked.

“He said, ‘If you get a second season, I would love to be a part of it,’” Kang said, “so I’m hoping to hold him to that.”

At Pitt, Kang studied performing arts and writing (“I basically designed my own major and just took classes I wanted to take which is a scam anyone at the University of Pittsburgh should look into”). One of her last classes was playwriting taught by Prof. Kathleen George.

“I always wanted to be involved in theater and TV and movies but I wasn’t a very good actress and I always loved writing but I couldn’t get the facts straight enough to be a journalist, novels were so long, poetry felt so serious,” Kang said. “It was sort of like Goldilocks, I couldn’t find a thing that was just right. When I stumbled upon this playwriting class it was like a light bulb went off: This is what I want to do with my life.”

After graduating from Pitt, she spent time waitressing in L.A. before getting her Master of Fine Arts in playwriting from CMU in 2000. While at CMU, Oliver Goldstick (“Pretty Little Liars”), then a writer on Ryan Murphy’s first TV series, The WB’s “Popular,” spoke to her class about sitcom writing.

“He was like, ‘If you can be funny, you can make a lot of money.’ And I was like, what’s this?” Kang said. “It never occurred to me that it’s someone’s job to write those TV shows that I grew up watching and loving. It seems so obvious but where I grew up, you didn’t know people who were TV writers.”

After CMU, Kang moved to L.A., worked as an assistant and landed her first staff writing job on NBC’s “Coupling” (2004), a hotly anticipated remake of a hit British series that flopped, but Kang met her future husband, Zach Rosenblatt (“American Dad”), when they shared a writer’s office.

In 2010 during her stint on “How I Met Your Mother,” Kang developed a CBS comedy, “Livin’ on a Prayer,” that would have been set in Pittsburgh and starred Mt. Lebanon native Joe Manganiello, but CBS passed on the pilot.

Kang managed to sneak one small aspect of her Pitt days into “Doogie”: Doogie’s best friend, Steph Denisco (Emma Meisel), is named after Kang’s college roommate. They lived together in Holland Hall and at the Fairfax Apartments on Fifth Avenue in Oakland.

Kang bonded with her fellow executive producers over CMU, too. The original “Doogie” was created by David E. Kelley and Steven Bochco, who, like Kang, was a CMU grad. Bochco’s son, Jesse, and widow, Dayna, are executive producers on the new “Doogie” with Jesse directing two episodes.

“When I met with them early on, I really nerded out (about the CMU connection) and they were so great,” said Kang, who credits Bochco’s ground-breaking work on “Hill Street Blues” and his series that followed with making TV a writer’s medium.

In a “Doogie” press conference last month during ABC’s portion of the Television Critics Association summer 2021 virtual press tour, Jesse Bochco said his father never wanted to reboot his own work but he encouraged his family to allow others to do so.

“In the last days of my dad’s life, he said, ‘You’ve got to do these. You have something here and they’re yours, so go do it,’” Jesse Bochco said.

Kang learned when Steven Bochco developed the original series, he had the show’s art department visit teenage Jesse’s bedroom as inspiration for Doogie’s bedroom. For the reboot, Kang sent photos of her 13-year-old daughter’s bedroom to the art department on the new “Doogie.”

“Jesse and I both really love that that tradition has been passed down,” Kang said. “It’s very much a labor of love over here.”