For the first two seasons of Doctor Who and most of the third (1963–1966), each episode carries its own title; the show displays no titles for overarching serials until The Savages, at which point the episodic titles cease.

The first episode deals with Ian and Barbara's discovery of the Doctor and his time-space ship, the TARDIS, in a junkyard in contemporary London, and the remaining episodes are set amid a power struggle between warring Stone Age factions who have lost the secret of making fire.

The first episode of Doctor Who was aired on 23 November 1963. The cover of the Radio Times that week announced "a new Saturday-afternoon television series of adventures in time and space".

The first episode, overshadowed by the assassination of John F. Kennedy the previous day, was watched by 4.4 million viewers; the episode was repeated the following week, and the programme gained popularity with audiences, particularly with the introduction of the Daleks in the second serial, which peaked at 10.4 million viewers. The season ...

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An Unearthly Child was the first serial of season one of Doctor Who. It was the first televised Doctor Who serial and the beginning of the Doctor Who franchise in general. It saw the first appearances of the Doctor, Susan Foreman, Ian Chesterton, and Barbara Wright, played by William Hartnell...

The Pilot Episode is an alternate cut of the first episode originally shown to Sydney Newman