Back in April, we reported that Disney was developing a female-led reboot of classic improbable medical drama Doogie Howser, M.D. with Fresh Off The Boat and How I Met Your Mother writer/producer Kourtney Kang. The plan for the new show, tentatively titled Doogie Kameāloha, M.D., would be to do the same basic thing but with a half-white, half-Asian girl in Hawaii being the one who becomes a practicing doctor at 16-years-old.
Now, as reported by Deadline, Disney+ has given the reboot a straight-to-series, 10-episode order and is planning to go into production later this year for a 2021 premiere. We also have some more plot specifics to go along with that news, with Deadline adding that the new Doogie is Lahela Kameāloha, with Doogie apparently being her nickname for some reason, whose life as a teenage genius is complicated by her “spit-fire Irish mother” who is also her supervisor at the hospital and her “Hawaiian ‘Local Boy’ father” who has a hard time accepting that young Doogie “is no longer his little girl.” (In the original series, Boy-Doogie’s dad was a doctor with a private practice.)
As was the case in April, there’s no word on if original Doogie actor Neil Patrick Harris will appear, but it would be fun if there was some indication that this takes place in the same universe as the old show. Maybe Lahela gets the nickname “Doogie” because she reminds people of the famous medical prodigy? Or, better yet, it exists in a universe where the old Doogie Howser TV show exists! Then Harris can show up as himself and make meta-jokes about how the woman who created this reboot also worked on How I Met Your Mother, which he was also on.