The Doctors

[Soaplovers]

From what I understand Colgate exited out of the television production business in 1980 and NBC probably offered to resume production/owernship of the show.. hence why it continued for 2 more years or so until it canceled it.   As it turns out, maybe it wasn't for the best to let NBC have ownership of the soap since the quality declined and now believed 'lost'.  

 

[Broderick]

That's the way I understood it.  At the time, the media made it sound as though Colgate-Palmolive dissolved Channelex, Inc., in September of 1980, at the conclusion of the 1979/1980 season.   That move left The Doctors without a production company.  NBC-TV, as the show's licensee, decided to assume outright ownership of it rather than cancel it.  Channelex Inc then punted the show to NBC, under whose ownership it limped along for another couple of seasons.  

[All My Shadows]

Is there really no way at all for the app to pick up where you left off? It’s going to get super annoying click-click-clicking through episodes when you’re deep into the summer of any given year. Having each year as its own “show” and then each month as a season was literally the definitive way to organize a long-running soap on streaming.

Edited July 31, 2023 by All My Shadows

[MontyB]

I'm so glad Retro is airing 1980 episodes again Saturdays.  On this particular episode Viveca Strand is on the table getting a massage and I was thinking how high is that masseuse's hand going to go?

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Edited July 31, 2023 by MontyB

[GLATWT88]

Speaking of 1980, where was the intent behind bringing on Darcy, Alan, and Brad? Do you think they were trying to freshen things up?

[Paul Raven]

Definitely. The storyline was promoted as a '3's Company' set up. At the time 3's Company was a smash hit so they were looking for some of that impact in having 3 singles sharing an apartment. Don't know if the casting and writing really came together though.

[GLATWT88]

Now that you mention it, the setup definitely had a Three's Company feel. 

[DRW50]

Not sure if this episode was already around or not, but someone uploaded it. Another 1981 episode...and a strike episode, always fascinating to see. 

I skimmed through most of that, but when you see Kim Zimmer with crimped hair you have to stop and watch. 

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[MichaelGL]

I think Doris Quinlan was the right producer for DOCTORS at the time in 79/80, but Ralph Ellis and Eugenie Hunt were the wrong writers to execute ideas that she clearly wanted to implement into the show. Quinlan was right to have wanted someone a strong writer like Lemay. Such wasted potential, bc the 3's company idea is a interesting idea IMO. 

[dc11786]

@DRW50 Thanks for sharing that. I hadn´t seen it before. Such a mess of an episode best exemplified by whatever Elizabeth Hubbard is doing in her one scene. I don´t know how much of that was scripted or not, but it is an insane scene. I have read in one of the newspaper summaries that Nick Bellini was stated to be dead around this time. Í´m curious if that´s the reason the scene ends with his picture. 

It´s great to see a little bit of Matt´s impotence storyline. I´m still unsure how Maggie is pregnant by the end of the summer, but I was hoping we would find out if there was a resolution to the impotence or the writing just got that bad. 

Jerry and MJ´s comedy of errors date was almost on par with Hubbard´s one-woman meltdown. 

I´m surprised by the material in the Kevin Shaw / Nola scenes. It´s such a bizarre story, but the scenes were well done. Zimmer seems to be trying to find some way to sell Nola´s motivated seduction of Kevin, only for Kevin to reveal that he was raped as a child by a friend while his sister Catherine watched. I think later they reveal Kevin and Catherine have also slept together, or maybe that´s just how Kevin´s confession has gotten twisted in the retelling over the years. 

[Soaplovers]

I'm assuming Althea is in the midst of grieving hence the oddness and randomness of her scenes.

This MJ seemed annoying, not at all likable like the original MJ

Kim Zimmer wore stranger hair styles in the mid 80s (I think she had her hair in odd spikes when she won her first Emmy) so this hairstyle seems normal.  I do like the gothic vibe of the scenes and she was much more subtle here then she ever was on GL.

[Paul Raven]

Wasn't Althea a mess due to the death of daughter Penny?

That was another idiotic move by the show. Althea had already lost one child and there was no long term reason to kill her daughter. In fact, bringing back Penny would have made more sense. Althea was now a middle age woman , which at the time was not the best age to be in soaps. Giving Althea a daughter to play against opened more story possibilities and would have placed a younger legacy character on the canvas.

And we saw from Lucinda how Elizabeth could play the mother of  a troubled daughter.

Then the casting of Jerry with a good actor but not someone who's going to make the cover of the mags.

While other shows were pushing older characters to the backburner, TD is giving Matt and Maggie an impotence story. 

They really needed to read the room at that point.

[DRW50]

Kim used to say in interviews that when she didn't like a storyline, she would experiment with her hair. This was during her GL run, but I have to wonder if that was also the case here. 

I think Kim had her subtle moments as Reva, especially in her first run, but I agree she does good work here. 

And thanks @dc11786 for adding more context to the scenes. 

I do think there was story for Althea with Penny's death if she adopted a young girl and became overly focused on her life, but I don't think the show ever did that, aside from some teasing in synopses. I agree killing both her children was too much. The Doctors seemed to have a problem with not wanting its older characters to be matured (similar to what later soaps would do). I guess they did with Carolee and Steve in the show's last few years, at least...?

[dc11786]

As I recall, Penny died in January, 1981, in a plane crash right before or right after Althea returned to the canvas. Althea was brought back as a potential obstacle for Matt/Maggie. It does seem like Althea is having a moment because all of the stuff she has had in storage has arrived and there are painful memories, but it just comes off as very odd to me since there is no attempt to explain the source of grief in context. 

Jerry came back in March, I believe, when Nola remarried Jason. I think there was tension between Althea and Jerry over what had happened in Japan, which was a mystery. It was later revealed (during the strike) that Jerry was involved with drug lords. I think Robin´s stepfather, Sebastian, was the head of the drug cartel that Jerry was involved with. At one point, I thought I figured out why they killed off Penny, and I think it had something to do with Matt and Maggie, but I don remember anymore. 

It was weird bringing Jerry back as a doctor when he had previously been a lawyer. Jason dies during the strike killed by Kevin´s deranged sister, Catherine Shaw. It would have helped to have had a lawyer around. Penny had died in a plane crash with no body recovered. I imagine the plane was to bring her back at some point. 

I don´t think it was terrible to give Matt and Maggie a marital conflict that wasn´t an infidelity. I think Matt´s impotence also was part of Steve Aldrich´s book about sex. I just think it was silly to jump from an impotence story to a pregnancy story. 

There was a story teased towards the end of the Writer´s Strike in August, 1981, when a mysterious young woman, Robin, was brought to the hospital. It was suggested in the weekly summaries that Robin might be Penny, but I think it was more of a story beat. Given the nature of Penny´s death, she easily could have returned. 

[Paul Raven]

Laryssa Lauret article from TV Guide. It was quite a coup for Laryssa/The Doctors to have this published as TV Guide seldom dealt with soaps.

PORTRAIT OF A HUSBAND STEALER By Edith Efron

They stand there, studying the house on a tree-lined street in Forest Hills, Long Island—the old real-estate agent and his cool brunette client.

“The garden. .. . It’s just a patch

. . not big enough for two children,” says the brunette. She has a subtle, unidentifiable accent. She looks slightly French.

“The house has hollow-tile construction,” parries the agent.

We eavesdrop on the negotiations interestedly. We are spending the morning with the brunette—one Laryssa Lauret, a character actress who’s made a smashing impact, this year, on daytime TV. As Dr. Karen Werner in NBC’s The Doctors, she’s a Mysterious Alien Female, a foreign Home-Wrecker and Husband-Stealer, whose morals have been denounced by domestic militants from Coast to Coast. It’s a little strange to find the Home-Wrecker house-hunting on her day off.

It’s even stranger to study her out of role. Off screen the slender, thirtyish Laryssa is also a Mysterious Alien Female. The mystery seems to come from an unusual combination of opposites—charm and coolness, sensibility and aloofness. Her face is framed by casual curls and tousled bangs— but the face itself is guarded.

The house-hunting session is terminating in futility. The agent departs, murmurous. “Sweet old man,” whispers Laryssa, “he’s disappointed. . . . Well, let’s find a cozy place and drink coffee and chat.”

En route to coziness Laryssa doesn’t talk much. “I’m not really brunette,” she comments, as she drives. “This is my Karen Werner wig. I wore it for TV Guide. Under it, I’m blonde.”

We talk idly about her Karen role. She sums it up, first person, with quiet irony. “I’m immoral,” she says. “J tried to break up Dr. Matt’s marriage. I was really after him. Then I got pregnant by another man. I’ve tried to commit suicide. I was drunk, you see, and he raped me.” She chuckles softly. “Oh, yes. Immoral, unstable. But a very good doctor.”

We arrive .at a coffee shop, settle down at the counter. Laryssa thoughtfully sips coffee and talks. And gradually the story of her life—and of her “mysteriousness”—comes out. “I'm from Poland. Warsaw. I came here when I was 11. My father was a portrait painter. He was in a concentration camp. Then we fled from the Communists. . . .’” For a moment, the grave unsmiling eyes look off into the past. “We were D.P.’s. . . . displaced persons. . . . That’s our story.”

Why did they flee? “We wanted freedom. We just wanted to be free. We fled the way everyone else was fleeing.”

For many years she worked for the U.S. Government, beaming broadcasts behind the Iron Curtain, first for Voice of America, then for Radio Liberty. The flight from the Communists is still a reality. “It’s such a horror. . .” She shudders. “My hair stands on end, when I think of it. . . . I get goose flesh talking about it.”

We pay for the coffee and leave. Now we are en route to her home. We switch to a happier subject—her career. A Lee Strasberg trainee, she’s been on Broadway (“Night of the Iguana”), on TV (The Catholic Hour, The U.S. Steel Hour), and has been playing the Karen Werner role for almost a year.

A Doctors director, Hugh McPhillips, declares, “She gets more response than any other character on the show. She’s a brilliant, sensitive, rare actress. . Everything she does is remarkable.”

“I've always gotten acting jobs effortlessly,’ she says. “They’ve just come. I sort of expect it, now. You know, I believe the right things will occur if you live the right way.”

What’s “the right way”? “Living by my highest sense of the good,” she says gravely. “Did you ever read Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography? He kept a notebook. He made points in it, trying to correct his character. I was so impressed by him. I copied him. I kept a little notebook. I had a check list, honesty, integrity .. . all the virtues. I wrote in it every night. I tried to erase my flaws.”

Suddenly, TV’s Home-Wrecker and Husband-Stealer swerves into the driveway of a solid stone house in Jamaica. We enter a plant-and-sculpture-filled living room. In front of an old-fashioned upright piano stands a baby carriage. Laryssa dives toward it and scoops up a baby. “My sweet little angel!” she cries. The baby girl suddenly howls in distress. Rapidly, Laryssa investigates. Hunger? Thirst? Diapers? “Oh,” she cries, “I know what it is!” She rips off her wig. The baby takes a fast look, and calms down. “Of course, of course,” Laryssa croons. “That wasn’t me, was it. That was Dr. Karen Werner.”

We too take a fast look, and feel slightly like the alienated baby, in reverse. Without her wig, Laryssa is fantastically transformed. Her hair is the color of flax. Pulled back tightly, it stresses the high brow and wide cheekbones. The French look is gone. We are staring at a beautiful, regallooking Slav.

A slender, dark-haired man with a sensitive foreign look appears in the doorway. He is carrying suitcases. He nods politely, and disappears again. It is Laryssa’s husband, a business agent for a union, who doesn’t wish to be interviewed. He, too, has a guarded face and unsmiling eyes.

A three-year-old named Ulana appears, crawls onto a chair, hangs upside down like a peach suspended from a branch, and makes a cheery speech in some unknown tongue. “She’s' talking Ukrainian,” explains Laryssa. “My husband is from the Ukraine. Ula also speaks Polish. We’re trying to keep both languages up with the children.”

It is suddenly quite real that this is a family of escapees from the Soviet world—that the two sets of grave, unsmiling eyes are carriers of unforgotten pain—that we are not just sitting in a simple living room, but in a political haven.

The family is leaving for the weekend. The preparations are rapid, quiet and sober. The presence of a reporter in the living room provokes no automatic social display or small-talk. The adults murmur to each other, caressing the children casually as they pass back and forth. 

The tranquil preparations come to an end. They are ready to leave. Laryssa scoops up both children, we follow her into the street and watch them all enter the car. The silent Ukrainian husband lifts his hand in . farewell. The infant, encradled by blondeness, purrs. Laryssa’s adieus are revealing. “Let's meet again, and really talk politics,’ she says.

We wait as the big car slowly angles into the street. As it turns, the beautiful Slav, who loves Ben Franklin and political freedom, gradually disappears from view. After an instant, all we can see of TV’s Mysterious Alien Female is a slender figure, covered with American babies. .. . Then the gentle family is absorbed into the stream of U.S. traffic.