Successful medical television sitcoms are few and far between. While medical dramas last for years and years – i.e., Grey’s Anatomy, St. Elsewhere, E/R, Medical Center, The Good Doctor, Marcus Welby M.D., Emergency!, Chicago Hope, The Good Doctor – there are very few successful medical situation comedies. Let’s see. There’s Scrubs, M*A*S*H, St. Denis Medical, for examples.
I mean, it’s not like there HAVEN’T been attempts at hospital sitcoms in one form or another. I recall Matt Frewer (Max Headroom) helming a series called Doctor, Doctor that lasted a couple of years at best. There was also a sitcom called E/R that was a spinoff of The Jeffersons, but that’s a bit of a stretch.
Which brings me to this medical monstrosity.
This is Temperatures Rising, a 1972 sitcom that may or may not provide some laughs.
This aired in 1972, and was produced by William Asher, who just finished a long run as the showrunner for Bewitched. In fact, this series existed only because ABC owed Asher a new series when they cancelled Bewitched after an eight-season run.
The cast itself is pretty solid, with James Whitmore as the over-stressed hospital chief that had to deal with a bevy of semi-adequate nurses and a scheming doctor (Cleavon Little). Yeah, this show has all the hallmarks and tropes of an early 1970’s-era ABC sitcom, and although the ratings for Temperatures Rising were okay, the show never took off as ABC hoped.
What to do, what to do …
So what ABC did do with Temperatures Rising was … in a polite word … meddle.
ABC had another sitcom on its 1972-73 schedule, The Paul Lynde Show, which also had its own ratings issue. But rather than cancel The Paul Lynde Show entirely, they simply moved Paul Lynde to the Temperatures Rising series, and created (ahem) The New Temperatures Rising for the 1973-74 ABC schedule.
In a word … yikes.
Cleavon Little is the only cast member to return for the second season – Lynde replaced Whitmore, and all the nurses were replaced as well. You’ll notice William Asher is not the showrunner for this reboot. He recognized ABC’s meddling, and walked away from this like a health insurance provider running away from a pre-existing condition.
And The New Temperatures Rising was just straight-up painful to watch. The show was cancelled midway through its second season.
Or was it?
Because ABC tried to “meddle” again. They convinced William Asher to return and “save” the show, they brought back a couple of characters from Season 1 of Temperatures Rising, they added Alice Ghostley to the cast (who had worked with Paul Lynde on Bewitched), and shortened the title back to Temperatures Rising. Oh, and they kept Cleavon Little in the cast.
This iteration barely lasted half a dozen episodes before ABC finally, figuratively, and literally, pulled the plug. Time of death – 1974.
Definitely a curious example of a show that lived longer than necessary … even though its end of life was rather – shall we say – compromised.
Chuck The Writer 
IIRC, ABC had a contract with Lynde, too, despite his being on another channel in the morning (Hollywood Squares on NBC). ABC put his solo series and Temperatures Rising on the wrong nights, and, IIRC again, separately.
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