Mom's "Stories"

One of the things that's happened over on RetroTV these days (besides reruns of classic Doctor Who and my personal hobbyhorse, Doctor Simon Locke) is that they're showing the old NBC serial drama The Doctors, right now from 1968.

Mom started out watching the classic CBS soap operas, the ones that came over from radio, with portentous titles like Search for Tomorrow, The Secret Storm, The Guiding Light (which started life as a religious serial), and The Edge of Night (which started out as a serial version of Perry Mason), all fifteen minutes in length like their radio antecedents. Life's rude indignities, like cheating spouses, miscarriages, infertility, and sudden illness, were all punctuated with the chords of organ music, hallmark of the daytime soaps. This was the soundtrack to the afternoon of the years before kindergarten, although I paid little attention; better the stuffed animals, the blocks, and the little books than the perpetually dismal people on afternoon television.

Somewhere in the early 1960s Mom switched allegiances to NBC. The regular schedule took a bit to shake out, but eventually it became Days of Our Lives at 2 p.m., followed by The Doctors, with Another World at three, and Return to Peyton Place at 3:30, finishing off with the AW spinoff Somerset. Days I mainly recall for the venerable leads of the Horton clan, the mellifluous McDonald Carey as Tom Horton Senior and Frances Reid as his wife Alice, Somerset because they had spun off Sam and Lahoma (Jordan Charney and Ann Wedgeworth) from Another World. I retained an interest in Return to Peyton Place for the two years it was on because (1) Guy Stockwell, who played Dr. Rossi, was a real fox back then and (2) I wanted John Levin, who played little Matthew Carson, for a little brother. (He was adorable.)

Another World was Mom's favorite as well as my particular addiction for a while, and Michael M. Ryan was my guy. He played attorney John Randolph, who defended young Patricia Matthews against a murder charge and then later married her. In the usual soap opera-y way of things, crises happened. (The cast also featured a young guy named Sam Groom who played Pat's youngest sibling, who went on to—what else?—Doctor Simon Locke.) I finally had to wean myself off it because I was getting too involved in the storylines. They killed poor John off not long after that.

The Doctors was a series I remember chiefly for Gerald Gordon's portrayal of brilliant but hotheaded surgeon Dr. Nick Bellini and the quite wisdom of Hope Memorial Hospital's chief of staff, Dr. Matt Powers, played by the dependable James Pritchett. It's been a total gas watching the series again. I don't watch soap operas any longer, but I leave NBC on for Snowy (and did for Schuyler before him) and have run into the modernities of Days of Our Lives over the years. The first thing that strikes me about The Doctors is that it's populated by real adults. When I watch Days it seems everyone is in their 20s and early 30s and rippingly gorgeous, the women with long flowing hair, pouty lips, highly-mascara'd eyes, and superb figures, the guys fashionably youthful with bristling beards and six-pack chests. Oh, there are a few older folks like Stefano (?) still around, but most of them look like they're one step from having graduated from Glamorous University.

The sets are oh-so-tiny compared to the vast McMansion sets of today! There's the doctors' lounge, the nurses' station, the lab (which features an endlessly bubbling tall beaker of a yellow solution and a couple of other retorts and pipettes full of colored liquids, just so you know it's a lab, you see, which is in question because they keep geraniums in the window!), and several rooms that seem to do much duty as many different homes and apartments. And I'd really forgotten how funny the show could be: a recent story featured a long-haired guy named Jody who is a janitor at Hope Memorial Hospital, but who aspires to be an orderly and study medicine. Dr. Powers tells him he can have the orderly job if he cuts his hair, and half of one episode featured a hilarious sequence where Jody's friend Liz, Nurse Simpson, and the hospital barber all conspire to get him a haircut. Yet another continuing storyline has Doctors Nick Bellini—our brilliant surgeon with a hair-trigger temper, but a good heart, and Mom's favorite character—and Althea Davis—a mother as well as a doctor—getting engaged, and Althea's pre-teen, romantic daughter from a previous marriage, Penny, happily organizing a big wedding for them that neither want. While Nick and Althea are madly trying to figure out why the heck wedding organizers and newspaper social editors are calling them, Martha the laboratory technician keeps finding them canoodling in the lab.

Oh, yeah, there's the usual soap plots that kept everyone coming back in the 60s: the paralyzed woman who's afraid to walk after surgery, Maggie Powers believing her husband has made a fellow doctor pregnant, the fellow doctor entering into a loveless marriage (at least at her end) with the father of her child to keep her job and "give the baby a name," young Mike Powers' trying to make it as an intern at his father's hospital, and more. But there's a lot less sturm-und-drang and a lot more situations where you can actually get to know these folks and have some fun through the suds.