Jordana Spiro

"What would have happened if Meadow Soprano had gone on to medical school and become a doctor?" That's the question writer-producer Josh Berman said he found himself wondering when Jamie-Lynn Sigler (who played Tony Soprano's brainy daughter on The Sopranos) guest-starred on his show Drop Dead Diva.

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Thus was planted the seed for The Mob Doctor, Berman's new series that stars Jordana Spiro as Dr. Grace Devlin, a surgeon who tries to balance her professional career with a secret side job: providing medical services for the Chicago Mafia in order to pay off a debt owed by her brother (Jesse Lee Soffer).

Berman says that after Sigler's appearance on Drop Dead Diva, he and co-producer Rob Wright started researching real-life Mob doctors. "We were shocked," he said. "It is the underbelly of organized crime their medical fixers, so to speak. So when we found out that this actually did exist, it became even more compelling and that's the point we decided, 'We have to write this.'"

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Inspired by one nonfiction account in particular, Ron Felber's Il Dottore: The Double Life of a Mafia Doctor, Wright and Berman started developing the character of Grace. Berman says the series will balance the medical drama with Grace's personal life story lines bookended by her relationships with her boyfriend/colleague (Zach Gilford) and former Mafia boss/family friend Constantine (William Forsythe).

"We have some episodes that take place predominantly in the hospital, and then some that take place predominantly in the field," Berman said. "I like to refer to those cases as the dirty medicine cases, because we get to tell stories without the bureaucracy of a hospital, and to me that's what's so compelling. ... When Grace is in the field, the only thing she needs to do is worry about the patient. And I think she takes that energy and that passion back into the hospital with her, which kind of gives her that 'I don't give a damn' attitude when it comes to placating her bosses. Instead, she puts her patients' interests first."

Spiro, who previously starred in TBS' comedy My Boys, said she was drawn to the role due to the moral dilemmas Grace faces as she tries to extract herself from the Mafia life. (Her father was a minor player in the Mob.) In the pilot episode, for instance, Grace receives a message to kill a patient, an informant who's brought into her hospital."This woman is making choices that are very morally conflicted and yet, at the beginning, it's to save her family," Spiro says. "And so this question becomes, 'How far do you go, and where is that line that you absolutely won't cross? And what happens when that line keeps edging further and further away?'"

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Mafia Medicine: Jordana Spiro, Josh Berman Weigh In on The Mob Doctor