Richard Chamberlain had the title role in the TV series Dr. Kildare which ran on NBC from 1961 to 1966 — or, making this personal, from when I was nine until I was fourteen. I think I was around twelve when I began watching this series regularly for a personal reason. The man who moved into the home directly across the street from us was a very important doctor at UCLA Medical Center and he was the Technical Consultant on Dr. Kildare.
I've written about him here before but it's been a while. His name was Dr. William H. Swanson. I found the following obit online and while there might have been another Dr. William H. Swanson in the world, I believe this is the one I'm writing about here…
Dr. William H. Swanson, medical director of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center for 33 years and former associate dean of the UCLA School of Medicine, died July 13, 2019. He was 85 years old. Dr. Swanson completed his residency in internal medicine at UCLA, after graduating from the University of Washington School of Medicine. He was known as a humanitarian and philanthropist, who championed equal rights and freedom of speech, and he was an advocate for environmental causes.
Assuming it's the same guy, we can add another somewhat-less-important item to his list of heroic deeds: He was the first person to show me what a script for a television show looked like.
Once he heard that the Evanier kid across the street wanted to be a writer, Dr. Swanson invited me to help myself to scripts. He had crates of them in his garage — in some cases, multiple drafts of Dr. Kildare episodes. They'd send them to him and he'd type out memos correcting facts or terminology. Occasionally, he'd find himself on the phone with some actor teaching him or her how to pronounce "phenolphthalein" or "leishmaniasis."
The scripts I got from Dr. Swanson were often for episodes that hadn't aired yet. When they did, I'd watch with the script in front of me, following the action and dialogue, noting where they differed from the mimeographed pages. Sometimes, a whole scene would be rewritten or truncated or omitted altogether. It was my first "lesson" in how to write a script, not just for a TV medical show but for anything.
Recently, for no visible reason, I got to thinking about that series and I got the urge to watch some episodes of it. I recall it as being a very good show when I was thirteen years old and I was wondering if it still would be a very good show now than I'm seventy-one. Alas, though I now have about a billion and eight streaming channels available to me, I can't find one that is streaming Dr. Kildare.
Occasionally, that would mean that the series no longer exists. Or it might mean that some company has film or tape of all or most of the episodes but the shows are in need of major restoration work that no one wants to pay for at the moment. In this case though, there are apparently excellent quality prints of all 191 episodes. I could order the complete set from Amazon for $238.76. I do not want to do this. It can't be so good I'd want to devote 191 hours of my life to it. That's like eight solid days of watching Dr. Gillespie give sage, experienced advice to the young, learning-the-ropes Doc Kildare.
Oh — and this is interesting. Between the time I typed the above paragraph and now — about four minutes — Amazon has lowered the price to $238.17. This was obviously done to tempt me and only me but I still don't want to pay that. I may order one season but I thought I'd ask first here and see if anyone knows where it's streaming. If it isn't now, I have the feeling it will be soon. Some of those channels are getting desperate. They can't all be running I Love Lucy nine thousand times a day indefinitely.
Here's a scene from Season 1 of Dr. Kildare that features a very young William Shatner. It's amazing how long that man has been working. This was 61 years ago. To put that in the proper context: THIS WAS SIXTY ONE YEARS AGO!!!
And remember how recently, I told you about an actor named Eddie Ryder and said he popped up in dozens of TV shows in the sixties? Well, he had a recurring role for a while on Dr. Kildare and he's in this scene too. He's the doctor on the right…