All-Time Time-Wastin' Champ: I've Finished NBC's Soap, The Doctors!

After years and years of false starts, I've finally achieved another worthless TV-watching milestone:  I've made it through The Doctors, the NBC daytime serial that ran for 20 years, and won the first Emmy for Best Show Daytime (1972).

 

 

I mean the entire series.  From start (sorta) to finish (sorta). All 4,865 episodes of The Doctors that remain, saved for some unknown reason by its owner, Procter & Gamble, minus 290 episodes that somehow or other, didn't survive (supposedly the last year and a half were available...before they magically disappeared during the scamdemic.  I'm calling bullshit).  

 

 

Soap operas, like so many other American daytime TV programming from the 1980s and before, were largely considered one-offs with no historical, and more importantly financial, value, and were thus considered disposable (so if they were even preserved on video tape in the first place, a huge percentage of them were later "wiped" to reuse the-then expensive magnetic tape).  The Doctors, happily, escaped that fate, and remains remarkably intact.

 

So...the main question you may have (aside from how I've managed to avoid a 72-hour psych hold for so long) is WHY?  Why would I want to waste literally years of my life watching decades-long programming that many people would call ancient, irrelevant--and highly disposable--junk?

 

It's a valid question (if rude).  Except for watching episodes of Dark Shadows when I came home from morning kindergarten (Spaghetti-Os with franks, chilled strawberry Kook-Aid--no ice; I didn't want it watered down), a show I consider "horror" programming first, and "soap opera" second, I had zero childhood experience watching soap operas.  Soaps were for dopey housewives, icky high school girls, and senile old grannies wrapped up in their ridiculously fake "stories."  Back then, no self-respecting all-American straight boy would have been caught dead watching a soap.

 

If you were home during a weekday, you usually didn't watch TV, anyway...because there was nothing on (okay, maybe game shows, but cartoons and syndicated fare didn't start until late afternoon).  The only time I had to watch soaps was when I was forced to by my crazy Geritol-swiggin' granny, whenever she was babysitting, or we were visiting.  She was loyal to a fault to her NBC "stories," so I have no doubt I had to endure episodes of The Doctors...but I have no conscious memory of it.  I hated having to watch them with her.

 

Somehow, though...early exposure to stuff you didn't initially like--at least for television--can have a rebound effect later in life when you least expect it (I couldn't abide Lawrence Welk when we had Sunday dinner at Granny's...and now, I kinda...love it).  Certainly late-night, afternoon movie show exposure to big, soapy movie melodramas (entertaining mellers like Peyton Place, The Long, Hot Summer, and of course, Valley of the Dolls) also primed me for the daytime soaps, too.

 

By the time I was in middle school, prime-time network soaps were coming back in style, too, with the biggest thing on TV involving the devilish antics of J.R. Ewing and the folks on Dallas.  Even better, due to the size of my old man's Channel Master TV antenna (biggest on the block, he'd proudly proclaim, while cranking that beautiful "sundial" CM rotor), and by geographic luck, living about 60 miles (downwind, thank god), of Windsor, Ontario, we were able to get CBC's Channel 9 crystal clear.  And that meant repeats of Britain's greatest serial, Coronation Street.

 

I wish I could convey how amazing it was for me, an Anglophile as far back as single digits, who delighted in any "foreign" movie from England, suddenly discovering that I could watch little 30 minute "kitchen sink" movies every day, with grotty, pasteboard sets and marvelously funny, touching characters like Ena Sharples, Annie Walker, Elsie Tanner, Mike Baldwin, Eddie Yates, Albert Tatlock, and my favorite, ear-splitting, hair curler-wearing Hilda Ogden (the amusing irony of this kind of programming seeming wildly "exotic foreign fare" to a know-nothing Midwestern boy, was completely lost on me at this early point).

 

Still, Hilda Ogden's curlers and shrill fishwife screech could only get you so far, if you know what I mean...so when high school rolled around and I discovered more, um...mature visual stimulation in the American network soaps, I was hooked.  If I was home sick, or if I had a day off from my various summer jobs, it didn't hurt to flip the channels real quick to see if power-mad, slutty lynx Brenda Dickson was lounging poolside on The Young and The Restless ("Well, hello!"), or dark, sensuous brunette Colleen Zink, with that impossibly silky bob, was trying on some new lingerie (black, of course) on As the World Turns, or statuesque California "good girl/blue balls-giving champ" Katherine Kelly Lang, rocking some impossibly tight-fitting bikini on The Bold and the Beautiful.

 

WHY THE SOAPS AREN'T JUST FOR WOMEN AND THE GAYS

(in top-to-bottom order of hotness) 

 

Those beautiful, sexy women made it a lot easier to rationalize watching a genre that the public's--and more importantly my old man's--perception said was strictly for women and gay men.  And once hooked, and armed with a more educated palette, I could appreciate some of the remarkably talented performers that were turning the frequent dross of dialogue into comedic and dramatic gold.  If Brooke didn't have the latest swimwear on, then TBATB's Daniel McVicar's and Darlene Conley's Clarke Garrison and Sally Spectra exchanging barbed insults was just as entertaining.  And if As the World Turns' Barbara Ryan already boffed some guy before you switched over (she was such a wonderfully bitchy piece of ass), you could hit the floor over expert farceurs Elizabeth Hubbard and Larry Bryggman fighting to the death as sex-crazed power boss Lucinda Walsh and devious, perverse Dr. John Dixon.  God, soaps were great then.

 

It's not surprising, then, that when Retro TV announced in 2014 that they had the rights to broadcast all the extant episodes of The Doctors, I went into paroxysms of ecstasy.  I was stunned, frankly; I had no idea this treasure trove of vintage TV had survived The Great Wiping apocalypse.  As a historian (hahahaha!) but more importantly, as a hard-core lover of anything television-related, I was positively freaking out.

 

These kinds of re-discoveries of so-called "lost media," particularly one of The Doctors' magnitude, is a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence.  And this wasn't just another shot-on-35mm film sitcom or adventure series cleaned up for modern consumption.  This stuff was network-produced, but far rougher, more immediate, in its execution, with frequently flubbed lines, technical difficulties (boom mikes and giant cameras frequent prowl around in full view), giving a delightfully crappy verisimilitude that only adds to the crudely vibrant melodrama. 

 

As for sociological study, here's a rare opportunity to see fictional characters move through 20 years of an America experiencing seismic changes, not only in political terms, but in every kind of term, from gender roles, religious convictions, social decorum, and moral standards, to what jokes are funny, what you have for breakfast, and what clothes you do or don't wear. 

 

If you added it all up, allowing about 20 minutes or so for each episode, it took in the neighborhood of 68 days for me to watch all of The Doctors.  That's if I was watching 24/7 (the most I ever did in one sitting was an epic drunk where I started on a Friday night and let it run until I passed out on Sunday morning.  I remember every episode).  What a phenomenal waste of time.

I can't wait to do it again.

 

Reading back over this...am I crazy for wanting to start reviewing The Doctors, right from the beginning?  Each and every episode?  A lot more needs to be said about this remarkable achievement (I mean me watching over 1,600 hours of this soap again).  We'll have to see....