The title of ABC’s “The Good Doctor” is simple and complicated. Mostly, the show is exactly what it sounds like: a hospital melodrama, with whiz-bang medical science, a dash of intra-staff romance and shameless sentimentality. It’s more competent than good, but it’s well-versed in the workings of the human tear duct.

What makes it distinctive — and possibly what has made it, in its debut season, one of the most-watched shows on television — is the way it interrogates the word “good.” Is there more to it, the show asks, than simply being effective?

“The Good Doctor” does that, counterintuitively, with a protagonist whose inability to connect emotionally is one of his defining features. Dr. Shaun Murphy (Freddie Highmore), a new surgeon at a prestigious hospital in San Jose, Calif., has autism and savant syndrome.

Earnest but distant, Shaun often needs to have simple responses explained to him, like why parents would be sad to hear that their son is going to lose his leg when the amputation will save his life.