Where is Best Medicine filmed? Port Wenn's harbour is real — it just isn't on the ocean
Port Wenn is written as a Maine fishing village on the Atlantic. The water in nearly every exterior shot is fresh, tidal, and about ninety minutes north of Manhattan.
Best Medicine premiered on Fox with a preview on 4 January 2026 before settling into its regular Tuesday slot on 6 January. Josh Charles plays Dr. Martin Best, a Boston surgeon who gives up the operating room to become a small-town GP, which is the premise Britain's Doc Martin ran on for eighteen years. Abigail Spencer, Annie Potts, Josh Segarra and Didi Conn fill out the town. The town itself is Cornwall, New York, on the Hudson, with additional work in and around New Hamburg further up the river.
The town doing the acting
Cornwall and its riverfront supply the harbor, the main street and most of the village geography. Spencer has said the single-location approach let the production put money and time into one community rather than scattering across a state, with cast and crew becoming regulars at local businesses.
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What Cornwall does not have is the ocean, and the Hudson is a tidal estuary with an opposite bank clearly visible across it. Production designer Diane Lederman handled that with camera angles and digital work — shooting to exclude the far shore, extending water where needed.
The team was "very diligent in making sure it didn't look like a river," showrunner Liz Tuccillo told the Portland Press Herald in 2026.
The Maine village that isn't in the show
The scripts come from a real place. Tuccillo, the executive producer and showrunner, visited Corea — a fishing village in Gouldsboro, east of Acadia National Park, in a town of roughly 1,700 people — and spent time talking to residents before writing.
"I wanted it to feel similar to the original Doc Martin and be by water and have those amazing views," Tuccillo told the Press Herald in 2026.
Some of what she collected went in directly:
- Jean Symonds — a retired nursing professor and longtime lobster fisher out of Corea Harbor, and the basis for a character on the show.
- Barry Canner and Bob Travers — former operators of Corea's Black Duck Inn, consulted on local texture.
- Baked bean suppers — a real Down East institution, written into the fictional town.
- Browntail moths — a genuine Maine public health nuisance, and an unusually specific detail for a network comedy.
What Maine viewers noticed anyway
The complaint from people who know the coast is not the geography but the grooming. The fictional Port Wenn is tidier and more picturesque than working Maine villages, and the boats in its harbor read as pleasure craft rather than the lobster fleet that would actually be tied up there. Which is a fair reading of a Hudson Valley marina standing in for a working waterfront.
It's coming back
Fox renewed Best Medicine for a second season in March 2026 on the back of its ratings, with Hudson Valley production expected to continue. The Cornwall waterfront is, for the moment, the most convincing fake Maine harbor on American television.
For the record: the original Doc Martin shot its Portwenn in Port Isaac, Cornwall — a real fishing village on a real ocean. The American remake relocated to Cornwall, New York, which is a coincidence nobody involved has claimed credit for.
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