Plot
The plot centered around Dr. Mark Sloan (played by Dick Van Dyke), a renowned physician who occasionally worked for the local police department as a consultant, and who could not resist a good mystery or a friend in need. Those cases often involved his son, Detective Steve Sloan (played by Barry Van Dyke). Helping him was his friend Norman Briggs (played by Michael Tucci in seasons in 1-4), a hospital administrator. Also assisting Dr. Sloan, were his colleagues, medical examiner/pathologist Dr. Amanda Bentley (played by Victoria Rowell) and Dr. Jack Stewart (played by Scott Baio in the first two seasons), who later left and was replaced by a new resident, Dr. Jesse Travis (played by Charlie Schlatter from season 3 onwards).
A program similar in name and theme aired on CBS from July to September 1960. Diagnosis: Unknown starred Patrick O'Neal as pathologist Daniel Coffee, who worked with the police detective, played by Chester Morris, to solve unusual cases. Martin Huston played the handyman, Link, and Phyllis Newman portrayed Doris Hudson. The program was a summer replacement for The Garry Moore Show.
Read more about this topic: Diagnosis: Murder
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)