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The Doctors (1963 TV series)

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The Doctors
The title card used from 1980 to 1982.
Created byOrvin Tovrov
StarringJames Pritchett
Elizabeth Hubbard
Ann Williams
David O'Brien
Country of origin United States
No. of episodes5280
Production
Running time30 minutes
Original release
NetworkNBC
ReleaseApril 1, 1963 –
December 31, 1982

The Doctors is a soap opera which aired on NBC Daytime from April 1, 1963, to December 31, 1982. There were 5280 episodes produced, with the 5000th episode airing in November 1981. The series was set in Hope Memorial Hospital in the fictional "Madison," located somewhere in New England.

From anthology to serial

Originally, The Doctors was not supposed to be a conventional soap opera. It first aired in 1963 for a trial run as an anthology series with self-contained episodes about medical emergencies. When the show was brought back in 1964, the show adopted a serial form of storytelling. For most of the series, storylines revolved around Chief of Staff Matthew Powers (played by James Pritchett).

Storylines

The Doctors was considered to be more risqué in storyline choices than its rival, General Hospital (which premiered on the same day). While the doctors on General Hospital worked in harmony with one another for the most part and in some cases were intimate friends, the physicians on The Doctors were much more cutthroat.

For example, Dr. Powers was put on trial for murder, was forced to rescind his Chief of Staff position, and became very depressed. Another doctor took over Powers' spot and immediately schemed to remove his allies, such as Dr. Althea Davis, from positions of influence in the hospital. In another storyline, one doctor's nurse found out that he killed his rival and made it look like suicide. When he discovered that she knew the truth, he tormented her every day at work until she committed suicide herself, allowing him to get away with the murder.

Another medical storyline that was notable on the show was that of cancer. Doreen Aldrich (played by Jennifer Wood and then by Pamela Lincoln), suffered from leukemia.

Awards and production

In 1972 and 1974, the serial received a Daytime Emmy for Best Drama. In the years following, announcer Mel Brandt would inform the audience at the beginning of each episode: And now, The Doctors: The (Emmy-award winning) program dedicated to the brotherhood of healing.

For most of its run, The Doctors was packaged and sponsored by the Colgate-Palmolive company through its Channelex division; in September 1980, NBC took over production in-house.

Broadcast history

The popularity of The Doctors began flourishing in the late 1960s, when it was featured in advertisements for NBC's 90-minute serial block. NBC aired the show in the timeslot of 2:30 p.m. Eastern/1:30 Central, in between Days of our Lives and Another World, two highly rated shows. The premiere of The Doctors succeeded an 18-month-long early effort by entertainment mogul Merv Griffin to establish a daytime talk show, and the serial stayed put in its timeslot for nearly sixteen years. This is an extraordinary feat for daytime shows of its day, especially since some of its victims in the ratings were long-running favorites such as CBS' House Party with Art Linkletter and ABC's Dating Game. Broadcasting history's longest-running soap opera, CBS Daytime's The Guiding Light, also competed against The Doctors on several occasions.

From the late 1960s until the mid-1970s, The Doctors was among the higher-rated soap operas of its time. In the 1973-1974 television season, the show peaked at fourth place, behind CBS' As the World Turns and fellow NBC serials Days of our Lives and Another World. However, within a period of three years, The Doctors plummeted from fourth to eleventh in the ratings. The decline in ratings was partly attributed to two soaps with which The Doctors shared its timeslot: One Life to Live and Guiding Light, which expanded to an hour in consecutive years. ABC increased the running time of One Life to Live from 45 minutes to an hour in 1976; CBS expanded Guiding Light to an hour in length in 1977. In 1979, the ratings for The Doctors took another hit after NBC decided to extend the length of its own soap opera, Another World, to 90 minutes from 60. This necessitated an earlier start time for Another World, which aired at 3:00 PM at the time, and a move of The Doctors to 2:00 PM, which alienated many of the series' longtime followers. However, the ratings drop for The Doctors was not as severe, as it finished the season just two-tenths of a point lower in the Nielsen ratings. Still, the move after nearly sixteen years did cause some damage to the show's ratings, and the worst was yet to come.

In August 1980, NBC moved The Doctors to a timeslot that caused a much larger ratings decline. On August 4, 1980, The Doctors moved from 2:00 PM EST to 12:30 PM EST to make room for Texas, a spinoff of Another World. The youth-oriented Ryan's Hope on ABC and the long-running Search for Tomorrow on CBS were already airing in that timeslot, and several NBC affiliates preempted the entire 12:00 PM hour to air local newscasts and various other syndicated programming. As a result of the loss of affiliates and the solid performance of the other two soaps in the timeslot, The Doctors went from a 6.1 rating at the end of the 1980 season to last place, with a 3.8 rating, in 1981. Then, The Doctors finished with a 3.3 rating at the end of the 1982 season, leaving it in last place once again.

On March 29, 1982, NBC Daytime moved The Doctors for a third time in as many years. This time, the move was made to accommodate the serial's former ratings rival, Search for Tomorrow, on its schedule. Search had been moved from its 12:30 PM timeslot to accommodate an earlier starting time for The Young and the Restless and moved to 2:30 PM. Series producer Procter & Gamble, dissatisfied with the ratings drop, insisted on getting the show's old timeslot back, but CBS would not budge and elected not to renew Search when its contract came up in early 1982. NBC was willing to give the (at the time) longest running television soap opera the slot. In a complicated switch, Search took over for Password Plus on NBC's daytime schedule. The Doctors was moved into the 12:00 noon slot, which Password Plus had given up after its cancellation. Consequently, The Doctors lost even more affiliates in the 12:00 slot than it ever did in the 12:30 slot; many more markets preempted the first half of the hour for local newscasts than they had the second half, let alone the whole hour. In markets that did air The Doctors, the ratings were further eroded by the hit game show Family Feud on ABC and the first half of The Young and The Restless, which by then had become a major phenomenon in its own right, in certain time zones on CBS. Thus, the already-falling ratings for The Doctors plummeted to previously unheard of levels. NBC itself didn't help the situation; on April 26, 1982, NBC moved the dying Texas, which had never done well in the ratings, to 11:00 AM to serve as the lead-in for The Doctors. By the time NBC canceled the long running serial in 1982, it had reached a 1.6 in the Nielsens; this was the lowest level any soap opera had reached in the history of the rating system, breaking the record that ABC's short lived 1970 soap, The Best of Everything, had set with a 1.8. The Doctors aired its final episode on December 31, 1982, some three months before it would have celebrated its 20th anniversary on NBC.

The 1.6 rating for The Doctors stood as an all-time low by itself for over twenty-seven years. However, CBS' long-running Guiding Light, which ended its final year in September 2009, tied the mark with an identical rating. Those two soaps, along with The Best of Everything, Sunset Beach, Port Charles, and Passions, are the only network soaps to end their runs with a Nielsen rating below 2.0. Passions, Guiding Light, and Sunset Beach finished with a sub-2.0 Nielsen rating twice; and each of these series except Sunset Beach finished their final year with a sub-2.0 rating.

Proposed spin-off

House of Hope was a proposed spin-off of The Doctors in 1970. NBC Daytime picked up Somerset, the Another World spin-off, instead.[citation needed]

Cast

List of The Doctors characters

The five core characters during the series' run were:

Several well-known actors and actresses had roles on The Doctors throughout its long run:

Main Crew

Some notable writers, producers and directors of The Doctors: Henry Kaplan, Dennis Brite, Douglas Marland, Frank Salisbury, Malcolm Marmorstein, Rita Lakin, Elizabeth Levin, Gerald Straub, Orvin Tovrov, Allen Potter, Joseph Stuart, Robert Costello, Leonard Kantor, Robert Pollack, David Cherrill, Doris Quinlan, A.M. Barlow, Heather Matthews, Kate Brooks, Ralph Ellis & Eugenie Hunt Richard Christopher(JJ.Gop) played Dr. Mike Powers in 1967 while under his management with Universal Studios /Joseph Gershensen Musical Supervisior)\

{{s-start} |- style="text-align: center;" |- style="text-align:center;"

|style="width:30%;" rowspan="1"|Preceded by

First Winner

| style="width: 40%; text-align: center;" rowspan="1"| Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series
1974

| style="width: 30%; text-align: center;" rowspan="1"| Succeeded by

|- |}

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