18 minutes ago, cody_1990 said:

The first 60 minute episode aired on January 23 1975. The episode Retro TV has available to stream for that date cuts off at 24 minutes, the last 15 or so minutes are missing. Not sure if it aired on Retro TV like that or not.

The next special episode, the 90 minute episode that aired on March 15 1976 and included the return of Nick to save Althea aired in 3 half hour increments on RTV and is available for streaming that way.

The other 60 minute episode which aired on March 29 1977, the return of Carolee to Madison, is the same as the 90 Min episode, broken up into 2 half hours segments.

Thank you so much. Appreciate your help!

Am jumping around through various years and the thing that strikes me the most is how divine Lydia Bruce is as Maggie in every storyline she's involved in. I cannot phantom why this extremely talented actress never received at least not one Emmy nomination, let alone a win! She deserved it!

I'm watching the aftermath of the tornado now and Maggie has finally been rescued and there's a scene in hospital between Matt and MJ and two thoughts come to mind: How do we eventually get to the breakup of the Powers' marriage and who were the people who thought pairing Matt with MJ was ever a good idea?

There is a podcast with Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner of Star Trek.

Frakes mentions his role on The Doctors.

I posted it on the "retro soaps" thread because other soaps are discussed.

Link to post: https://boards.soapoperanetwork.com/topic/68121-all-general-retro-soap-discussion/page/32/#findComment-2093351

Do you ever wonder if literally anyone is watching The Doctors on RetroTV currently? I don't see any chatter online about the show, and haven't for several years. Pre-Covid, we had such lively discussions about the show both here on SON, and in the Facebook groups. It all seems rather over now.

According to a Nov 1966 article Loretta Swit had previously appeared on The Doctors.

On 4/24/2026 at 10:35 PM, Tisy-Lish said:

Do you ever wonder if literally anyone is watching The Doctors on RetroTV currently? I don't see any chatter online about the show, and haven't for several years. Pre-Covid, we had such lively discussions about the show both here on SON, and in the Facebook groups. It all seems rather over now.

Does RTV still exist? I got it in my area around 2005 when it was branded RTN then around 2013 it disappeared. I think it only became available in certain limited markets because of financial problems. I relied on seeing The Doctors when episodes got uploaded to youtube. That got shut down after a period of time when I got up to about 1977 episodes.

6 hours ago, Paul Raven said:

According to a Nov 1966 article Loretta Swit had previously appeared on The Doctors.

Film Reference site's profile also has an unidentified role on The Doctors.

@jam6242

Lynda Hirsch July 16 1978

The staff of “The Doctors” was quite excited when they hired ETHEL and MEL BREZ to script the show. The enthusiasm, however, wore off when the team’s writing took a turn for the worse — seems the couple kept forgetting what they had written in previous scripts. The situation became so disconcerting for the performers that the writers were axed. Too bad. “The Doctors” was starting to improve, but it’s hard when scripters keep going through the revolving door

On 5/12/2026 at 12:14 AM, Paul Raven said:

Lynda Hirsch July 16 1978

The staff of “The Doctors” was quite excited when they hired ETHEL and MEL BREZ to script the show. The enthusiasm, however, wore off when the team’s writing took a turn for the worse — seems the couple kept forgetting what they had written in previous scripts. The situation became so disconcerting for the performers that the writers were axed. Too bad. “The Doctors” was starting to improve, but it’s hard when scripters keep going through the revolving door

Wow. I had never heard that. Very interesting. Honestly think after 75 the writers, though having some good moments here and there, were wildly inconsistent with storytelling and that destroyed the once-popular show. Though watching many of these episodes today, they hold my interest more than any current soap, except for GH, which is on fire, in my opinion, though I realize it's not everyone's cup of tea.

It kinda lines up with Kathleen Turner's comments about working on TD and how frustrating it was for her because Nola seemed to change with every script (to the point where Turner herself decided to play Nola as if she had had a drinking problem, lol).

The Doctors promo (1979)

On 5/16/2026 at 2:49 AM, DRW50 said:

The Doctors promo (1979)

9 a.m.? That couldn't be great for already-falling ratings. Where I lived though, then Edge was on at 9 a.m., too, in one market and 10:30 a.m. in another, either optimal time slots obviously. I didn't realize TD started facing that same fate as early as 79, perhaps due to AW expanding?

On 5/15/2026 at 12:07 PM, Khan said:

It kinda lines up with Kathleen Turner's comments about working on TD and how frustrating it was for her because Nola seemed to change with every script (to the point where Turner herself decided to play Nola as if she had had a drinking problem, lol).

Kathleen Turner on her soap opera days: “My character was so incredibly dumb”

"So I just asked the writers to make her a drunk," the legendary actress said of her "The Doctors" role

By Kathleen Turner - Dustin Morrow Published September 15, 2018

 After you finished your college degree, you moved immediately to New York City to work in theater.

Kathleen Turner: Yes, it was terrifying but exhilarating to move to New York. I drove there the day I finished classes. I had exactly $100 in cash. Period. I was supposed to stay with a friend that first night but she had reunited with her boyfriend. I got to New York at about 3:00 in the morning and slept in my car on the east side, up in the 80s. It was scary—Manhattan wasn’t the Disney playground that it is now—but it was incredibly exciting and I was fearless.

D.M.: And you were able to start working as an actor pretty quickly.

K.T.: Almost immediately. I mean, I had day jobs like every other actor, but I started acting professionally very quickly. I was off-Broadway within five months, on the soap opera after nine months, and was on Broadway by eleven months.

D.M.: Tell me about the soap opera.

K.T.: I was a regular on The Doctors. Which no longer exists, for which we can all be thankful.

The Doctors was a soap opera set in a New England hospital that ran on NBC from 1963 to 1982. Kathleen appeared on the series in 1978 and 1979. Among the many other notable alumni of the series are Alec Bald­win, Ellen Burstyn, and Ted Danson.

D.M.: No good?

K.T.: Whatever. It was fine. It was just a very run-of-the-mill soap opera. My character was so incredibly dumb that at a certain point I just couldn’t figure out how to justify the words that came out of her mouth, so I just asked the writers to make her a drunk.

D.M.: Ha! That is crazy.

K.T.: So crazy! I’ll tell you the breaking point for me on The Doctors. I remember this like it was yesterday. I was doing a scene where I was giving birth, after a four-month pregnancy of course, and I had researched the process and learned lamaze breathing and everything. After the first take the director, who was a man of course, came up and said, “You’re doing great, I can really feel what you’re going through. But can you just be a little more . . . ummm . . . attractive?”

“Attractive.” While giving birth. That was it for me.

D.M.: Stick a fork in you.

K.T.: Yessir. Done.

D.M.: Actors who move back and forth between theater and cinema or theater and television always talk about the differences between stage and screen acting, so I thought that instead I would ask you to tell me about the skills that translate, especially since I know that you started in stage and then moved to TV and then to film. What were you able to carry from one step to the next?

K.T.: Moving from TV to film was less of a leap for me than moving from theater to TV. That was a big transition.

D.M.: How did you get the part on The Doctors?

K.T.: Before I got the regular role on The Doctors, I was getting called in to do day spots on soaps because I have a near-photographic memory. I could learn scripts almost instantly. That made me pretty valuable as a soap actress.

D.M.: Theater and television are wildly different forums for an actor.

K.T.: Coming from the stage, I had always thought of acting as a process of rehearsal, of trial and error, of carefully fine-tuning something until it’s just right. You don’t have that kind of luxury, that kind of time, working in soap operas. When shooting a soap, you come in around seven or so and go through hair and makeup and wardrobe, and then you shoot until around four or so, and at five you do a light rehearsal, or sometimes just a table read, of what you are going to shoot the next day. That idea of creating a performance every single day was new to me, that idea of making choices that you had to implement on-the-spot. That was the most valuable thing that the soap opera gave me.

D.M.: What did you learn from that experience about acting for the camera?

K.T.: I don’t think I learned a lot about camera craft because it was a soap. It was essentially these huge, hulking, awkward cameras that wheeled around in a cumbersome manner. They didn’t afford a tremen­dous variety of camera angles. And there were several of them shooting at once, so the angle wasn’t as defined or as specific as it usually is when shooting a film. And there were all these terribly artificial soap opera performance demands. I would get a script that would say, “And we slow fade on a shot of Kathleen’s surprised expression.” And I would have to hold this ridiculously melodramatic expression until they finished this agonizingly long fade that would take them into a commercial. It was so stupid and so unrealistic.

D.M.: Well, no one watches soap operas for realism, I guess.

K.T.: Isn’t that the truth! But I did learn a very valuable lesson about how to use my personal experiences in my performances when I was doing The Doctors. There was a storyline in which my character’s mother died, and in reading the script I had this incredible rush of feeling, remembering my father’s death. It was a wave of emotion that I hadn’t felt in years, as he had been dead for several years at that point. It was as though the script had torn open a scar that I thought had healed over, it was hard for me. But I went home and I just thought, “Okay, just hold it together, keep it together, don’t indulge anything until the camera rolls tomorrow and then use it all.”

So the next day we shot this scene in which my character spoke to her dying mother in this hospital room, and I just let it all go. And I was wracked with grief, sobbing uncontrollably almost, and when we finished the show I thought, “Well, that is one of the truest things I have ever done as an actress.” And then I saw the show and it looked like the worst, hammiest acting in history! The lesson learned was that you don’t really want to be 100% real, on camera or on stage really. The performance of a real emotion is different from the actual experiencing of that emotion.

D.M.: For one thing, one is controlled and the other isn’t.

K.T.: That’s true, and you don’t ever want to be out of control when you are acting. Acting isn’t meant to be dangerous. We were auditioning young men for the role of the addict in the Broadway production of High, and one young man got so physical with me onstage that there was a genuine sense of the loss of control, and I felt for a moment that I was in real danger. He was way too rough with me. You won’t get a part if you can’t control your performance.

That said, I think that I have come closer to using real experiences on stage than in film because I have a lot more space to do it in. But that scene on The Doctors was awful, bad acting. However true it felt to me didn’t matter, it wasn’t about the truth.

D.M.: So it’s more about verisimilitude, an appearance of truth, than finding an actual truth.

K.T.: It’s about the truth of the scene, not the truth of the actor’s per­sonal experiences.

D.M.: The compressed period of time that you were talking about, with the fast production schedule of The Doctors, where you have basically a day to make big performance choices—if you are coming out of a theater background where you have a luxurious rehearsal period, then that’s tough to deal with. Do you just say to yourself, “It’s scary but I’m going to commit to this choice I made five minutes ago and hope for the best”?

K.T.: Basically. You have to. Having that experience on The Doctors helped me when I did move on to feature filmmaking, because I learned that on the day, on the moment when the shot was set, you had to be committed to your choices. There’s no do-over if you don’t like what you did on a given shoot day on a film. You can’t just go reshoot something because you were unhappy with your performance, it would be prohibi­tively expensive.

There are times when, if I happen to catch a few minutes from one of my films on TV, I see places where I could have made better choices. But that’s okay. What I am sure of is that I made the best choice I could make on that day, at that time, given the circumstances, given where we were shooting, who I was working with, and how everything had led up to that moment on that shoot day. I’m sure I said, “This is the best I can do.” So I am happy with all my film performances, because they represented my best effort on the days I shot them. It does no actor any good to sit around bemoaning mistakes or missed opportunities. Move forward and be proud of what you’ve done.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like she would've had a more positive experience working on soaps had she worked on a show with better writing.