The Royal Today is a British medical soap opera, a spin-off of the similarly themed drama, The Royal. The concept is that whilst The Royal is set in the late 1960s, The Royal Today featured the same hospital in the present day, with a new set of characters working in the same location. Each episode followed the events of a single day, and the show was broadcast daily, so the series could be said to progress in real time. The first series of 50 half-hour episodes began on 7 January 2008 on the ITV network airing from 4pm-4.30pm. Although there were a number of running storylines, the series generally eschewed the use of cliffhangers. The series was axed in March 2008 after poor ratings, on an average of 1.175 million viewers.