Fox returned to the medical drama game in the 2025 TV schedule for the first time since The Resident ended in 2023, and Doc got off to an extremely strong start in the new year. Hyped as a medical TV show centered on Amy Larsen, a brilliant doctor who lost a large chunk of her memory, the promotion attracted enough viewers to allow the series premiere to break Fox records. I spoke with the cast and executive producers about the killer ratings to start the show, and there was a consensus among them.
First things first!
How Doc Immediately Broke A Record
The series premiere of Doc aired on January 7, but the biggest part of the audience didn't tune in live that night. 2.2 million in the key demographic watched on the day that it premiered, but the total after eleven days was a whopping 15.6 million across platforms, including repeats. That marks an increase of 609% from Live+Same day.
Those numbers make Doc the most-watched Fox debut telecast across all platforms in five years. The medical drama broke the record previously set by 9-1-1: Lone Star in early 2020. The Doc series premiere aired just a few weeks before the series finale of Lone Star. Both shows are available streaming with a Hulu subscription now.
And speaking of streaming, Doc's first episode became Fox's most-streamed premiere across seven days in more than a year with 1.1 million viewers between Hulu and Fox.com. The previous record holder was The Floor. If that's still not enough, the second episode of Doc grew by 38% in Live+3 day totals. All in all, Fox couldn't hope for a stronger followup to Kitchen Nightmares on Tuesday nights!
How The Stars And EPs Feel About The Audience Size
The Doc team attended SCAD TVfest in Atlanta earlier this month, for a screening of the new series inspired by a true story and – obviously – off to quite a strong start. Members of the cast as well as executive producer Hank Steinberg and showrunner/executive producer Barbie Kligman spoke with CinemaBlend during the event.
Jon Ecker, who plays the unlucky-in-love Dr. Jake Heller as one leg of TV's most unconventional love triangle, shared this about seeing the record-breaking ratings for the premiere:
It's nice to get good feedback. We do this for four or five months. [The executive producers] are doing it for who knows how long before we even start, so to finally have it well-received is just nice.
The cast had already filmed the first season by the time Doc premiered and they walked the SCAD TVfest red carpet, so any feedback comes when it's too late to make any changes. Former Big Sky star Omar Metwally, playing Dr. Michael Hamda as another leg of the love triangle and Amy's ex, said:
It's exciting, because you put so much blood, sweat, and tears into it, and then you hope it's received.
The blood, sweat, and tears evidently paid off, and it can't hurt that each new episode is quickly available streaming on Hulu after airing live on Fox. Deadwood vet Molly Parker, who has had the heaviest acting load of Doc so far as the semi-amnesiac Dr. Amy Larsen, had her own take:
I'm really proud of the show, so you always hope that people will give it a chance.
While it remains to be seen what the audience looks like at the end of the season, I'd be very surprised if Fox doesn't order a second season. In fact, I'd love to see it paired with Season 2 of Rossif Sutherland and Kristin Kreuk's Murder in a Small Town. Amirah Vann, who plays Amy's psychiatrist and best friend Dr. Gina Walker, shared her own excitement about the viewership:
I was so excited that it was being received so well. You put your work in, you never know what it's gonna be. All you can do is make an offering. We love it, to be able to kind of take our time with it and nourish it and discover it and try to answer questions, and walking away with some answered. It's never perfect, but you make an offering. When you see it received so well, you get excited.
Executive producer Hank Steinberg has had plenty of reasons to pay attention to ratings over the years as the creator of Without a Trace, which ran for seven seasons and more than 150 episodes on CBS from 2002-2009. With Doc doing so well from the jump, Steinberg remarked:
It doesn't happen. It's crazy, especially with the number of shows out in the world on all different platforms. Very cool to have something break through like this.
Barbie Kligman, showrunner as well as executive producer of Doc, had plenty of producing experience herself prior to the Fox medical drama, including Magnum P.I., Private Practice, and CSI: NY, to name just a few. When reflecting on the audience size of her newest show, though, she called back to a show she worked on much earlier in her career. After I noted that network TV shows often don't get as much love nowadays as they once did, Kligman said:
We feel very blessed… When I first came up in Hollywood, I was an assistant on ER, and that got a lot of love. [laughs] At that time, there weren't streamers, there weren't any of those things. That got tremendous viewership. So getting good numbers [for Doc] feels really good.
ER in fact topped television ratings for more than one year throughout its 15-season run, so it's no wonder that getting "tremendous viewership" again feels good for Barbie Kligman. Whether that viewership will keep up through the back half of the season is the big question now.
If interested, you can do your part by tuning to new episodes of Doc on Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on Fox or stream afterwards on Hulu. This is just the latest medical drama to hit the airwaves, with other networks boasting shows like Chicago Med (NBC), Grey's Anatomy (ABC), and now Watson (CBS). Doc is the newest hit in the genre.
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