Midway through the premiere of Fox’s Best Medicine, schoolteacher Louisa (Abigail Spencer) recalls her life before she moved to Port Wenn. “When I lived in New York, everybody living in their little boxes with their little salads, that’s no way to live,” she sighs. She loves being in this tiny Maine village where everyone knows one another, she tells new-in-town Dr. Best (Josh Charles), even if it also means her neighbors might nose around her business or offer unsolicited advice.

I don’t know how many people might be watching that scene from their own lonely big-city apartments, or how many more from actual small towns that are nothing like cozy and picturesque Port Wenn. But Louisa absolutely nails the appeal of this show. Warm as a wool blanket, inviting as a hug and about as plausible as a fairy tale, Best Medicine offers a gift to the viewer: It allows us to imagine, at least for one hour a week, that there might be a cozier, happier, more sociable way to live.

Best Medicine

The Bottom Line Low-key and likable.

Airdate: 8 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 4 (Fox)
Cast: Josh Charles, Abigail Spencer, Josh Segarra, Annie Potts, Cree
Creator: Liz Tuccillo

Created by Liz Tuccillo (Alaska Daily), Best Medicine centers on Martin Best, a standoffish but talented Boston surgeon who’s abruptly taken a post as Port Wenn’s new general practitioner. His ostensible rationale is that he has fond memories of spending summers there as a kid with his lobster fisher aunt, Sarah (Annie Potts), and wants to help look after her now. His real reasons, which he keeps close to his vest, are rooted in an unnecessarily tragic backstory that the script occasionally trots out to remind us that he’s not a jerk, just troubled.

It all sounds very familiar, because it is: Not only is Best Medicine an Americanization of the long-running ITV series Doc Martin; even those who’ve never seen the original will be well acquainted with its central tropes — from the curmudgeonly physician to the quirky townspeople to the minor medical mysteries that comprise each episode’s A-plot.

But if it’s not reinventing the wheel, it is building a very solid version of the wheel — one that, in the first four chapters sent to critics, strikes a winsome balance between heart and humor.

Charles is excellent as Best, turning in a performance so finely calibrated that even a gesture as small as the way he flutters his fingers around a bunch of bananas clues us into the complicated emotions bubbling just underneath his invariably frowny exterior. Best is less misanthropic than grumpy, awkward and a little lonely, like a stray cat unused to being invited in — and therefore easy to like even when he’s huffing at his good-natured but hilariously useless assistant, Elaine (Cree), or turning down invites from locals eager to welcome him into their community.