Doogie Howser, M.D. (Mini Doctor)
Neil Patrick Harris. I tell ya, NPH has really caught fire, again. Remember a time when people thought Doogie Howser was his name? Who or what was a Neil, Patrick, or Harris back then?
Good old Doogie. At six years old, he landed a perfect score on the SATs. High School? Just nine weeks to complete. He slummed it at Princeton until graduating at the age of ten. By the time he was fourteen, he was the youngest licensed medical doctor in the country, according to this show. And ya know what? I can believe all of that.
What I never could believe as I watched this show as a kid, though, was the ending of every episode. He would write a journal entry about the big life lesson/epiphany he had reached. And every time … that journal entry was about a sentence and a half long. I never bought that. Not for a second.
Computers in the 80s were clunkers. It took about an hour just for DOS to load up, in those days. At best, he was maybe still running an outdated Windows ’82. Would he really sit around and wait for that thing to boot up just to write a couple of sentences? He could’ve just written his epiphanies on notecards instead, then. Plus, Doogie wasn’t just writing his memoirs because he loved the way “Dear Diary” felt rolling off his fingers. He’s a child genius. Obviously, the Doogie was crafting his memoirs to be published later. It’s all about the Benjamins, baby genius. Mini Doctor planned on getting paid.
So with all this said, there’s no way he only had twelve words of wisdom after each episode. Unless he was a hack, who cheated and scammed his way to the top. But Doogie seemed like the real deal. It’s the writers who cheated, with the hacky fortune cookie journal entry endings.
Way to overcome the child star curse, Neil P. Harris. Somewhere, the Small Wonder girl is all grown up now and still wearing that red and white dress, poking a Doogie Howser voodoo doll with pins.
BONUS MATERIAL:
For those of you who like 80s television and watched The Wonder Years, I’ll leave you with a funny clip from the show, which centers around comic Jon Friedman’s realization that if you take out the narration, the show was 95% staring at one another. Hilarious observation, compounded when you see the evidence.
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