Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Doc: Barnard Hughes and Elizabeth Wilson

This CBS sitcom from MTM Enterprises aired on Saturday nights August 1975 until October 1976.

During its first season, Doc was the story of an old-fashioned doctor practicing medicine in New York City. Joe Bogert (Barnard Hughes) was a kindly, soft-spoken doctor who was more concerned with his patients' health than with his fees (similar to The Practice, which premiered the following January). He was happily married to a woman named Annie ( Elizabeth Wilson), who was much tougher with his patients than he was; his daughter Laurie ( Judy Kahan) and son-in-law Fred ( John Harkins), a fellow he disliked intensely, rented the apartment above his. Doc's nurse was Miss Tully ( Mary Wickes), and Doc often sought refuge in the company of his friends Ben and Happy ( Herbie Faye, Irwin Corey).

Marginal ratings during the first season prompted a major overhaul in the fall of 1976. Doc now worked at the Westside Clinic, run by Stanley Moss( David Ogden Stiers later of MASH),and had a new nurse in Janet Scott (Audra Lindley who a year and a half later would get the role of Mrs. Roper in Three's Company). Gone were his wife and family and friends from the previous season. The new characters in the series consisted of the people who worked at the clinic with him, including Woody (Ray Vitte), and Teresa ( Lisa Mordente). The change didn't help the show, which lasted only 2 months in the new format before being canceled.

Here's a Review of Doc by TV Guide critic Cleveland Amory. It was in the April 17-23, 1976 issue of TV Guide.

Doc

REVIEW
by Cleveland Amory

Some situation comedies, or sitcoms, as they are commonly called, do just that: they sit, and almost never go anywhere. Doc is surely one of them. The idea of putting an old-fashioned family doctor up against the ills and illnesses of today is a fine one, but our hero here is neither a soothing and philosophical Marcus Welby nor a gloriously crusty old curmudgeon. He is, instead the bearer and butt of an epidemic of creaky gags. On this show the jokes come thin and fast.

As for the ills and illneses Doc is up against, some of them are the comedy lines and the rest are the situations. We've seen Doc up against-and we mean hard up against-a poker playing priest ( because Doc's wife thinks he should go to mass and confession more often), a lady from population control, and a burglar , whom Doc tries to rehabilitate. One reason this show never gets anywhere is that every episode seems to end back where it started from: Doc's " confession" to the priest was a series of jokes, and the lady from Population Control walked in on Doc's own population problem-a gathering of all 31 children, grandchildren and in-laws. As for the burglar, he was, when the last gag was fading, still stealing everything but the show. Some of the plots here can only be called bizarre-like the one in which Doc's son decides to leave the priesthood-to become a nightclub comic.

One episode did threaten to be a good one, at least in the beginning. In that one, Doc was asked to become a medical consultant to a soap opera called Hospital Diary. At first he refused, but when he was told he could make $300 a week doing nothing but reading scripts in bed, he accepted. " How can I turn it down?" he asked. " First time I've ever been offered money for anything I can do in bed." That was one of the good jokes. The bad ones go something like this. " It was a lovely funeral," someone says. " All those flowers, the limousines, eight pallbearers..." " Yep," says Doc, " that's living." When Doc introduces a friend to the poker-playing priest, the friend -heaven help him-says, " funny-you don't look Catholic." Had enough?

Doc is played by Barnard Hughes, who is blameless and should go nameless. Mostly he has to make do with out-of-character one-liners ; and on the rare occasions that he is given something to do, he overdoes it( probably because he feels he needs the exercise). Elizabeth Wilson, who plays his wife, is faced with a virtually pointless part-it is hard for her to make anything of it, let alone make the most of it. There are also three bufoons: Doc's son-in-law Fred ( John Harkins); Mr. Goldman, the perennial patient ( Herbie Faye); and Doc's nurse ( Mary Wickes). The nurse is apparently directed to come on like a caricature of an old time Army nurse, and she does. No wonder recruiting is down.

Barnard Hughes's Obituary

Barnard Hughes, Character Actor, Dies at 90

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Published: July 12, 2006

Barnard Hughes, a Tony- and Emmy-award-winning actor who was well-known for playing warm-hearted if not always serious-minded father figures, died yesterday in New York. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his son, the director Doug Hughes.

Though Mr. Hughes made his acting debut in 1934 at age 19 and already had a solid career in theater and television work, it was the 1978 Broadway production of Hugh Leonard’s “Da” that gained him his reputation as a skilled character actor, with a particular gift for jolly old Irishmen whose cheerfulness is tinged with melancholy.

Mr. Hughes played the title role, that of an exasperatingly affable and unambitious Irish widower who haunts the memories of his emigrant son. Walter Kerr, writing about “Da” in The New York Times, said Mr. Hughes was “masterly in the role of a lifetime, working skillfully as a watchmaker with every jewel in place.” John Simon, in New York magazine, said that Mr. Hughes “gives one of the greatest performances of this or any year.”

Mr. Simon continued: “Put this right alongside the achievements of the Gielguds, Oliviers and Richardsons.”

Mr. Hughes beat out Hume Cronyn, Frank Langella and Jason Robards for the best-actor Tony that year and also won a Drama Desk award. He did a reprise of the role of Da for a 1988 movie version, which also starred Martin Sheen.

A frequent presence in soap operas and television series of the 1970’s and 1980’s, Mr. Hughes won an Emmy for his portrayal of a senile judge on an episode of “Lou Grant.” He also starred as an avuncular physician in a short-lived comedy series, “Doc,” and as an Irish patriarch in the sitcom “The Cavanaughs.”

He had recurring roles on “The Guiding Light,” “As The World Turns,” “All in the Family,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Blossom.”

Mr. Hughes also had a long film career, appearing in “Midnight Cowboy,” “The Hospital,” “Where’s Poppa?” “Oh God!” “Tron,” “Doc Hollywood” and numerous television movies.

Bernard Aloysius Kiernan Hughes(Based on the advice of a numerologist, Mr. Hughes changed the “e” in Bernard to “a” to help his acting career, according to his son, Doug Hughes), was born in Bedford Hills, N.Y. on July 16, 1915, to Irish immigrants. Through high school and his first year at Manhattan College, he worked a series of jobs, including as a salesman at Macy’s and a dockworker, before a friend tricked him into auditioning for a repertory company that performed Shakespeare in high schools. He won a tiny role in “The Taming of the Shrew.”

Mr. Hughes soon dropped out of Manhattan College and stayed with the company for two years, eventually playing many of the major Shakespeare roles. He then began traveling the country, performing with a repertory company in Chicago and with a comedy troupe that toured the South. After a few years in the army in World War II, he returned to acting.

In 1946, while rehearsing for a show called “Laugh That Off” to be performed at a military hospitals, he met an actress named Helen Stenborg. They married in 1950 and would act alongside each other throughout their careers, appearing together in Mr. Hughes’s last performance on Broadway, in the 1999 production of Noël Coward’s “Waiting in the Wings.”

In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Hughes’s other survivors include a daughter, Laura Hughes of New York; and a grandson, Samuel Hughes Rubin.

For the next three decades, Mr. Hughes performed in Broadway productions like “Advise and Consent,” “Nobody Loves an Albatross,” “How Now, Dow Jones,” “Hamlet” with Richard Burton, and the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” for which he received a Tony nomination for his portrayal of the dim-witted constable, Dogberry.

Speaking of the early years, when he was playing mostly minor parts in film and theater, Mr. Hughes said in a 1978 interview in The New York Times that he could have played the roles “without pants.”

“I was always sitting behind something like a desk,” he said. “I was a judge or a businessman or a lawyer or a doctor. Nobody saw my bottom half.”

In 1981, Mr. Hughes played the rustic schoolmaster in the American premiere of Brian Friel’s “Translations” at the Manhattan Theater Club. Frank Rich, in The Times, called Mr. Hughes’s performance “especially exciting,” adding that “funny as he is, Mr. Hughes always turns his eyes sadly downward, as if he’s surveying the defeated landscape of his own soul.”

In the 1980’s and early 1990’s, Mr. Hughes alternated his film and television career with his stage career, acting on Broadway in Lanford Wilson’s “Angels Fall” and Craig Lucas’s “Prelude to a Kiss.” He also performed in Dublin, playing the role of Grandpa in “You Can’t Take It With You” at the Abbey Theater in 1989, and playing Da at the Olympia Theater there in 1991.

“I’m a feeler,” Mr. Hughes said of his acting approach in the interview with The Times. “As a matter of fact, I think if we had more feelers and less thinkers we’d be a hell of a lot better off — not only in the theater, either.”

For more on Doc go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doc_(1975_TV_series)