Original series run
From the late 1960s until the mid-1970s, The Doctors ranked as one of the top five daytime dramas in the United States. It peaked at fourth place in the 1973–1974 television season, 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 serials with which The Doctors shared its timeslot: ABC's One Life to Live and CBS's Guiding Light, which expanded to an hour in consecutive years; Guiding Light made this move in 1977, while One Life to Live along with fellow ABC soap General Hospital expanded in 1978.
As the 1978–79 season began, the entire NBC soap opera lineup was suffering in the ratings. While The Doctors was not alone in this, the network began a series of relocations involving the veteran serial that year, which would amplify the series' ratings trouble and eventually lead to its demise. The first move was done to help further increase the ratings of Another World, which had tied for the #1 spot in daytime the previous season. In an unprecedented (and since unrepeated) move, NBC decided to extend Another World and make it the first serial to run for 90 minutes daily. The Doctors, as part of the schedule shuffle that ensued, was moved to 2:00/1:00p, which placed it against the second half of As the World Turns on CBS and the first half of One Life to Live on ABC. The ratings declined slightly, but NBC was not done.
Procter & Gamble Productions (PGP), the producers of Another World, began development on a new serial in 1980 that would evolve into a spin-off of that serial set in Houston. The new program, Texas, was picked up by NBC who envisioned it as a daytime version of CBS' hit primetime drama Dallas. NBC needed to free up one hour of its schedule for Texas, and did so by cutting the runtimes of Another World (which reverted to its previous 60-minute slot) and The David Letterman Show by 30 minutes each. Launching on August 4, 1980, Texas was placed in the 3:00/2:00 p.m. hour with Another World, which had dropped to ninth in the ratings, moving to 2:00/1:00 to serve as its lead-in.
The cutting of Letterman resulted in a movement across the earlier portions of the daytime schedule as well, with Wheel of Fortune moved to 11:00/10:00 a.m. and Password Plus to 11:30/10:30 to follow it. The Doctors, which needed to move to accommodate Another World, thus took the place of Password Plus in the 12:30 p.m./11:30 a.m. slot following Card Sharks. The noon hour would often see affiliates of the three major networks opt not to air their offerings for at least part of, if not all of, the timeslot and usually air a local newscast or some other programming, and The Doctors disappeared from some markets when it made the move. In addition, the 12:30 timeslot was a competitive one for the three networks. ABC's competition came from Ryan's Hope, which had been beating The Doctors by nearly a full ratings point in the overall rankings. The serial's competition on CBS originally consisted of the long-running Search for Tomorrow, which was also pulling in significantly higher ratings than The Doctors had been. In June 1981, CBS moved The Young and the Restless to 12:30 and the ratings faded even further. The Doctors fell to a 3.8 rating at the end of the 1980–81 season, which was tied for last place with Texas.
NBC had not completed its reshuffling of the daytime lineup, though, and a Procter & Gamble serial was again at the forefront for the latest shift. In addition to the aforementioned Another World and Texas, PGP was the production company for Search for Tomorrow. When The Young and the Restless was moved, it took over the timeslot that had been home to Search for Tomorrow since its 1951 premiere. PGP was not willing to renew its contract with CBS to continue carrying the serial unless the network was willing to move it back to its original time; as things stood, Search for Tomorrow was airing at 2:30/1:30, which placed it against the second half of its fellow PGP production Another World.
NBC, however, was willing to do what CBS would not and began negotiating with PGP to move the long-running serial to its daytime lineup. NBC agreed to return Search to 12:30 p.m./11:30 a.m., which it did upon moving to the network on March 29, 1982. Once again, this required a shuffling of the schedule; Password Plus, which had been moved back to the Noon/11:00 slot following the cancellation of Card Sharks in 1981, was cancelled itself to make room on the schedule for Search and The Doctors was moved ahead thirty minutes to open up the timeslot.
Both moves did not help matters, as NBC's serial lineup as a whole had been struggling for some time. The Doctors continued to be the lowest rated of the group, and the move to noon exacerbated the issue. The only serial ahead of it in the ratings was its new stablemate, which saw viewership drop by half after its move from CBS. NBC tried to remedy the situation by cancelling two more of its game shows, Battlestars and Blockbusters, and using that sixty minutes to relocate Texas, which had not found an audience, to 11:00/10:00 a.m. on April 26, 1982, so it could serve as the lead in for the two veteran serials airing in the noon hour. The move did not work as all three serials finished with lower ratings; The Doctors saw its ratings cut even more, eventually falling below a 2.0.
NBC announced the cancellation of The Doctors (along with that of Texas) during the fall of 1982, and the last episode aired on December 31, 1982. The show once again finished in last place as part of the still-struggling NBC daytime lineup, which failed to see one of its serials finish in the top five in the final Nielsens for a fifth consecutive season. The ratings for The Doctors bottomed out at 1.6, less than half of what they were the year before and nearly one-fourth of what they were three years earlier. The final number broke a record set by the short-lived ABC soap The Best of Everything, which pulled a 1.8 rating at the conclusion of its only season in 1970; only Sunset Beach (1997–1999) and Passions (1999–2007), two later NBC serials, finished a season with a lower final rating.
The ninety minutes freed up by the cancellations of The Doctors and Texas were filled by game shows beginning the following Monday. The Doctors saw its place taken by Just Men!, which was cancelled after thirteen weeks. The noon timeslot would not receive a stable show until Super Password premiered in September 1984, which ran until March 1989.
