The “horrible” scene that’s haunted Ted Danson since 1975: “It was a horrifying, horrifying day”
For an actor, there can’t be many things worse than being eternally haunted by a single, specific moment from your career. It probably doesn’t happen to all of them, but it definitely happened to Ted Danson.
Having remained a fixture of the small screen since the early 1980s when Cheers turned him into a household name, Danson has enjoyed plenty of success. Not so much in cinema, but when it comes to televised fare, especially sitcoms, he’s one of the modern era’s most ubiquitous televised presences.
Not every show is a winner, though, and he was toiling for years until he landed his big break as Sam Malone. Remember when he popped up in two episodes of 1979’s The Amazing Spider-Man as a military Major? Exactly, nobody does, although he did at least tick the Marvel box before it was cool.
Like many thespians of his generation, Danson cut his teeth in one of TV’s most fertile proving grounds: the soap opera. His first gig as a working actor was on Somerset, a daytime soap, and his second was on The Doctors, another daytime soap, and the latter has been traumatising him ever since.
He actually played two different parts on the show, which is the sort of thing that happened all the time on soaps, since nobody cared enough to point it out or complain. In 1975, he appeared in nine episodes as Dr Chuck Weldon, but he was uncredited in most of them, before returning as Mitch Pierson for ten episodes in 1977, but he was credited in the majority of those.
Ahead of the first scene on his first day, he was panicking. “It was terrifying,” he remembered. “I said, ‘Oh, I’m not going. I’m not going to do it’. There was this wise psychologist that all of my college friends were somehow going to at the same time, who went, ‘Now, Ted, don’t cut off your nose to spite your face. Just show up. Take a Valium tonight.'”
Unfortunately, as Danson put it, “Valium and I don’t get along.” When he arrived to debut on The Doctors, he was “like a cartoon joke, perspiring in sheets, heart pounding: I was horrible, I did not last long on that show, needless to say.” He lasted 17 days in TV terms, to be precise, the time it took for his nine episodes to air.
Turning up to shoot his maiden scene while suffering from the lingering after-effects of the Valium he’d taken the night before set him up to fail, with the star recalling that he had a “full-on anxiety attack” as the cameras were preparing to roll, which troubled him so much that he questioned whether or not this was what he really wanted to do with his life.
“That almost ruined me for acting completely,” he acknowledged. “It was a horrifying, horrifying day.” Obviously, he got over it, but it’s clear that even 50 years of being gainfully employed hasn’t afforded him the pleasure of suppressing that memory.
