I remember the first time Nikki Newman took to the bottle as if it were part of my own family history.
In the early ’90s, Nikki, played by Melody Thomas Scott on “The Young and the Restless” since 1979, was pregnant with her then-husband Jack Abbott’s baby when she fell off her horse, miscarried and injured her back. In debilitating physical and emotional pain, she commenced wandering the luxurious Newman Ranch, wincing in agony and chasing pain pills with vodka or red wine.
Without disturbing her blond mane as voluminous as her fur coats and as stiff as her shoulder pads, she’d weep with undammed abandon; nobody in the history of television can cry as prodigiously as Melody Thomas Scott.
I was maybe 12 when this plot line was introduced and I watched, riveted, as addicted to the show as Nikki was to booze. Rewatching a dramatically scored clip of it now is so deeply familiar, I feel as though I’ve unearthed a home movie or awakened some long-buried memory in my own past. (With all this talk of excavation, I can’t help but be reminded of the time Lauren Fenmore, pregnant with her private-investigator boyfriend Paul Williams’ baby, was buried alive by her psycho stalker — she was exhumed just in time.)
“Y&R,” as the soap opera is known to its faithful, first aired in 1973. I got hooked in the mid-’80s at around nine, introduced by my older sister, and Genoa City quickly became the softly lit province of my childhood. It was exciting and comforting at once: its narrative twists were as far-fetched as its world was intimate and predictable; its universe melodramatic and vivid (both emotionally and esthetically) but also consolingly contained.
In Toronto, the show aired at 4:30 p.m. (it now airs at 4), and after school, when my friends went to, say, ballet class or to do their homework, I’d rush to Genoa City where I obtained my own sort of education. There were vocabulary lessons: I learned words like “blackmail,” “impostor,” “diabolical,” “annulment” and “consummation.”
For example, if you learn your new spouse is a diabolical impostor, you can get an annulment if the marriage hasn’t yet been consummated. And if you learn that your betrothed happens to be your long-lost brother, you should share this information to his back whilst he stares tearfully out a mansion window.
The characters felt like family, but I also watched the show with my family. My mom, the sort of person who can quote Camus and has read Proust’s complete oeuvre, was rapt by it despite herself. Even my dad took up the habit, though he often seemed less invested in the storylines than in the male hairlines. His own hair had exited stage left sometime in his 30s, so the follicular abundance in Genoa City was a source of fascination. “I don’t know …” he’d ponder, “I just think Brad Carlton’s hair is too lustrous.”
“There’s no such thing as ‘too lustrous,’” my mom would counter irritably, her eyes fixed on the inky coif in question. This was no time for chit-chat; the viewing hour was sacred.
Looking back, it occurs to me that watching “Y&R” may have been the only activity we all happily did together as a family. This may flirt with overstatement, but that’s something else I learned from growing up in Genoa City. “Y&R” does not traffic in subtlety.
So when I found myself sitting across from Thomas Scott and Peter Bergman, who plays Jack Abbott, on a recent Monday morning, my inner preteen expired and needed to be rushed to Genoa City Memorial. We were in a meeting space at Toronto’s Corus Entertainment, but it felt as if we could be in the boardroom at Jabot Cosmetics.
Both actors were warm, lively and charming and looked, frankly, superb, about as unaffected by time as the fictional world they belong to.
Attempting to get a grip, I asked Thomas Scott about her beginnings on the show four and a half decades ago (she won a Daytime Emmys Lifetime Achievement Award for the role in 2024). “Within the first month, Nikki’s father tried to rape her and to save herself she hit him over the head with a lamp and he died! So one month in and I’ve already killed somebody. My father!” she said, cheerfully. “I just went from one story to another of me being the victim, the innocent vixen too stupid to figure things out. And here I am today, nothing’s changed!”
This changelessness, it seems to me, is central to the show’s longevity. What has kept viewers seduced over the show’s extraordinary 52-year run is as much about what doesn’t happen onscreen as what does. For most of us, time is a metronome and a thief, but in Genoa City it’s thrillingly irrelevant. Even death isn’t a full stop: if you drop dead, or into a coma — comas are like naps in GC — you will likely revive, be better looking and find a new love interest. All rules of time and space are tossed out the window, much like when Jack, in a classic episode, threw an executive chair through the glass of Victor Newman’s office.
“There are six of us who have been on the show for more than 30 years,” said Bergman, who has been playing Jack Abbott since 1989; he credits Thomas Scott for suggesting him for the role when it was being recast. “Other shows may have some of those original players, but they’re not central anymore.”
I remark that Bergman looks indistinguishable from his character in a grey suit with a pink-and-white Oxford stripe shirt, his silken hair appearing presidential (and, yes, lustrous).
“I like to say that I sleep in a suit! So all I have to do is run my hand through my hair and I’m in character: I’m Jack!” Bergman says, beaming. It’s a sight I know so very well, having spent years of my life watching “smiling Jack,” as he’s nicknamed, flashing his winning grin. Also watching villains hoisting their eyebrows, and Victor Newman (Eric Braeden) declaring, “I’ll be damned.”
I admit that after tuning in daily for more years than I care to think about (anyway, what is time?), I haven’t regularly watched the show for over a decade. “When people say, ‘Oh, geez, I haven’t watched in a few years,’ I say, ‘Turn it on!’ You can catch up pretty fast,” Bergman said, laughing.
Last May, Bergman and Thomas Scott appeared in a special episode featuring no other characters, which has all the intimacy and theatre of a two-hander play. Nikki, who has fallen off the wagon (again), is swilling vodka and staggering around her room at the Genoa City Athletic Club when Jack, her AA sponsor, shows up to save her from herself. There’s a moment when Jack realizes he can’t convince her to stop drinking, so he tries a reverse-psychology tack, pouring himself a drink and raising a glass to Nikki, to toast their nearly 40-year friendship. It’s affecting; you can feel the actors’ deep shared experience and enduring fondness for each other.
Before I leave the reunion, I mean the interview, Bergman suggests we all take a photo together — a family portrait, of sorts. We hug and part ways, and I head outside into the dreary, rainy November Monday, reality playing its part a little too well.
Disoriented from the surreal encounter, from this collision of lives real and imagined, I head home and tuck into a recent episode of “Y&R.” It’s as if no time has passed; the show is a vector of nostalgia. As the familiar theme song rings out like musical Ativan, I can feel my nervous system relax.
The last time I watched the show, the Newman ranch had been burned to the ground in an inferno after Sharon Newman torched it during a drunken bipolar episode circa 2012. But today, Victor and Nikki are back at the newly rebuilt ranch and I feel as comfortably at home as Victor, holding forth in his cognac-coloured leather wingback chair.
The pair discuss their grandson, who is in the hospital after a mysterious car accident and there is talk of a “vindictive maniac” — diabolical, surely, and possibly an impostor. For the next hour, no time has passed, the past and the present are as entwined as Victor and Nikki, and all is right with the world. Nothing has changed and I’m almost convinced — emotionally blackmailed into believing — that nothing ever will.
