This ABC comedy series was set at the Capital General Hospital in Washington DC and featured the adventures of prankster Dr Jerry Noland (Cleavon Little) and his colleagues, presided over by the no-nonsense chief of surgery Dr Vincent Campanelli (James Whitmore).
Noland ran bingo games and off-track betting at the hospital while Annie Carlisle (Joan Van Ark), the sexy blonde Head Nurse, her wry assistant Nurse Mildred MacInerny (Reva Rose) and student nurse Ellen Turner (Nancy Fox) tried to cover up for him.
Campanelli left at the end of the first season and was replaced by Dr Paul Mercy (Paul Lynde), a new uptight penny-pinching administrator with a mother complex.
The show changed name at this point, to The New Temperatures Rising, Capital General was now a private hospital – owned by Dr Mercy’s meddlesome mother, Martha (Sudie Bond) who was permanently in residence and who kept calling her son via a beeper on his belt – and the chemistry of the series changed for the worse.
Miss Tillis (Barbara Cason) was the efficient accountant, “Windy” Winchester (Jennifer Darling), the romantically inclined nurse, and Dr Axton (Jeff Morrow), the cheerfully fraudulent surgeon who had recently published two books, Profit in Healing and Malpractice and Its Defense. Only intern Jerry Noland remained from the first season.
Dr Jerry Noland
Cleavon Little Dr Vincent Campanelli James Whitmore Student Nurse Ellen Turner
Nancy Fox Nurse Annie Carlisle
Joan Van Ark Nurse Mildred MacInerny
Reva Rose Dr Paul Mercy
Paul Lynde Martha Mercy
Sudie Bond Miss Tillis
Barbara Cason Nurse “Windy” Winchester
Jennifer Darling Dr Lloyd Axton
Jeff Morrow Dr Charles Cleveland Claver
John Dehner Haskell
Jerry Houser Edwina Moffitt
Alice Ghostley Nurse Amanda Kelly
Barbara Rucker Harold Lefkowitz
Bernie Kopell Nurse Ferguson
Ketty Lester Norman
Larry Storch
