EXCLUSIVE: Fox delivered its best series debut in five years with the launch of its new medical drama Doc.
The premiere episode has now amassed 15.6M cross-platform viewers in its first 11 days, according to the network, representing an impressive 609% increase over its live + same-day audience of 2.2M. It’s the most-watched debut telecast Fox has seen since 9-1-1: Lone Star.
In the first seven days after its January 7 debut, the episode drew 1.1M viewers across Hulu and Fox.com, which makes it the network’s best streaming performance for a debut telecast since The Floor last year. However, it seems that Doc is amassing a much larger audience overall than The Floor. As Deadline exclusively revealed at the time, The Floor‘s debut scored 4.4M cross-platform viewers in its first seven days.
Interestingly, it looks like much of this massive audience increase is coming from delayed linear viewing, rather than from streaming. Though, surely, streaming added a few more to that 15.6M tally in the four additional days of that 11-day window.
This is a promising start for Doc, which was further solidified by the second episode’s L+SD performance, raking in 2.7M viewers. That is a 13% increase over the premiere’s same-day audience, indicating that the series hasn’t hit its ceiling yet.
Doc stars Molly Parker as the hard-charging, brilliant Dr. Amy Elias, Chief of Internal and Family Medicine at Westside Hospital in Minneapolis. After a brain injury erases the last eight years of her life, Amy must navigate an unfamiliar world where she has no recollection of patients she’s treated, colleagues she’s crossed, the soulmate she divorced, the man she now loves and the tragedy that caused her to push everyone away. She can rely only on her estranged 17-year-old daughter, whom she remembers as a 9-year-old, and a handful of devoted friends, as she struggles to continue practicing medicine despite having lost nearly a decade of knowledge and experience.
The adaptation of the popular Italian series Doc — Nelle tue mani hails from writer, executive producer and showrunner Barbie Kligman, executive producers Hank Steinberg and 3 Arts’ Erwin Stoff, Sony Pictures Television and Fox Entertainment Studios.
Doc, which is also inspired by a true story, airs on Fox Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT and next day on Hulu.
