Daniel Stern isn't a doctor, but he plays one on TV. To make sure the Wonder Years narrator/Home Alone villain could fill the '40s wingtips of faux physicist Glen Babbit on Manhattan, a historical-fiction drama about life at Los Alamos during the race to build the atom bomb, executive producers Sam Shaw and Thomas Schlamme sent Stern back to school.

The producers created a basic syllabus for the writers and a suggested reading/listening/watching list of the best biographies, documentaries, podcasts, and other primary source materials about living and working at Los Alamos during World War II.

"I was amazed at how much research everyone was given. The really smart young people on our show, like Ashley [Zukerman, who plays Charlie Isaacs] and Harry Lloyd [Paul Crosley] dove into the science and the books and kept finding flaws and debating things in the scripts," Stern recalled in an interview with Yahoo TV. "I, on the other hand, am a high school dropout, and my brain doesn't work like that. I did not feel the need to dive in too much into the physics of it. I didn't read a bunch of books because that doesn't help me do my job. I was more interested in the humanity."

Watch a clip of Stern on Manhattan:

The producers also hired experts to teach an intensive basic-physics class to the cast before shooting commenced. In addition, there was a technical advisor from the current Los Alamos National Laboratory on set to handle last-minute questions, look at script tweaks, and proof chalkboard equations and other math-related set pieces.

"Because real history and science are the stage on which we tell the emotional personal stories of these characters, I felt that giving the actors a refresher course on basic scientific principles at play here would help them find the characters and add authenticity," Shaw told Yahoo TV. "You want to avoid mispronunciations and mistakes that would trip up viewers and take them out of the story as much as possible."

View photos Daniel Stern and John Benjamin Hickey in 'Manhattan' More

Stern admitted that the class was helpful but probably not in the way Shaw assumed it would be. "What was really interesting and inspiring to me was to see the passion the teachers had on the subject. Their enthusiasm grew with every question. My takeaway was that science is not intimidating when you have a head for it," Stern said. "They revel in it the way I do if I am sculpting something. I get obsessed when I am working on a new piece, and I saw that same joy in the real scientists. Their joy and their personalities were a great lesson for me in terms of how to play Glen. It clicked. That's who the characters are, too. They are obsessive people, brilliant people, screwed-up and withdrawn people. They are just like us, and finding that commonality was key for me."

But surely, after all the instruction, fact-heavy scripts, and months of filming at a highly detailed and immersive 10-acre re-creation of the compound in New Mexico alongside the real deal, the 56-year-old feels that he walked away a smidge smarter? "Yes, but only a very little bit. The only thing I think I will remember from it was the two theories on how to make the bomb. There's the gun theory, which is about having plutonium at one end of a bomb and something shoots at it to make it explode. The other method was implosion, which was described to me as, if you had a rubber ball in your hand and you squeezed it hard enough, you could make it compress in on itself and the energy would explode out from within. Those pictures made sense to me. Anything past that — an isotope, a neutron, a theory, a math problem — I don't think it's going to be there. I probably knew more when we were still filming, but I've been home for four days, and most of it went out of my head already."