Joshua Jackson Is Scrubbing Into Prime Time With New Ryan Murphy Drama

Joshua Jackson’s return to network television is exactly what the doctor ordered.

According to Variety, the 45-year-old has signed on for a new ABC series from Ryan Murphy titled Dr. Odyssey. It marks the first time Jackson will be returning to primetime television in more than 10 years following his role as Peter Bishop in Fringe on Fox, which ended in 2013.

Specifics about Dr. Odyssey’s plot are being kept under wraps, but Jackson is set to portray the charming titular character on the show, which will reportedly take place on a cruise ship. No other cast members have been revealed.

Jackson is executive producing the project alongside Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken. The latter have collaborated with Murphy, 58, on multiple projects over the years, including American Horror Stories and Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans. They are also developing a new legal drama for Hulu starring Kim Kardashian.

While Jackson has been away from network TV for some time, he already has experience with medical series. In 2021, he played neurosurgeon Dr. Christopher Duntsch on season 1 of the Peacock limited docudrama Dr. Death, which was based on the 2018 Wondery podcast about the doctors and the attorney who took down the real-life Duntsch. (The doctor was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017 after being convicted of maiming one of his patients.)

Ahead of Dr. Death’s debut, Jackson exclusively told Us Weekly how he prepared for the intense project. “I felt like I had the emotional bandwidth to take something like this on,” he said in July 2021. “It was more than even I anticipated it to be, but it was obvious for me from the very beginning that this was going to be quite a heavy lift.”

He added, “It wasn’t until we finished it and I put the whole thing down that I realized how heavy it actually had been over the course of the time. I was deluding myself about how capable I was to sort of leave it at the office. It was incredibly dark. The material is dark.”

Jackson also hinted in a 2022 Variety interview that he was looking forward to playing a different kind of medical professional in the future following the drama of Dr. Death.

“I’m happy to not play somebody as psychologically as intense as Christopher Duntsch for a little while because the weight of that was quite intense over the course of shooting the show,” he told the outlet at the time.

Along with Fringe and Dr. Death, Jackson is known for his roles in Little Fires Everywhere, The Affair, Fatal Attraction and Dawson’s Creek.