Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing St. Elsewhere, a medical show which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1988.  The show can be found on Hulu and, for purchase, on Prime!

It’s another day in Boston.

Episode 1.16 “Monday, Tuesday, Sven Day”

(Dir by Mark Tinker, originally aired on March 1st, 1983)

It’s a busy day at St. Eligius.  Here’s a breakdown:

1. The racial conflict is continuing.  Putting a young white man and a young black man in the same hospital room leads to an all-out brawl.  Some poor guy walking down the hall on a broken leg gets trampled in the melee.  Agck!
2. A man in a crude astronaut’s uniform shows up at the ER.  He doesn’t get any lines but his name tag identifies him as “J. Masius,” which is a reference to one of the show’s writers.
3. Oh, hey, it turns out that kid who claimed he was jumped by a bunch of black guys actually wasn’t jumped by a bunch of black guys.  Instead, his father (Dick O’Neill) beat him up.  Dr. Westphall threatens to beat up the kid’s dad.  They may be old but they both grew up on the streets of Boston!  What is it with old men from Boston and they’re need to threaten each other with fisticuffs?
4. Dr, Chandler hears another doctor make a racist remake and gets angry.  “I keep forgetting he’s black,’ the doctor says.
5. Dr. Morrison apologizes on behalf of the racist doctor.  Chandler tells Morrison that he’ll never understand what it’s like to be black.  Morrison agrees but then points out that he only lives two blocks away from Chandler so he does understand what it’s like to live in a poor neighborhood.  Uhmm….see, this is why I was kind of dreading watching this show try to deal with racism.  St. Elsewhere has been a good show so far but well-intentioned TV writer liberalism is usually the cringiest liberalism there is.
6. Peter’s wife is pregnant.  Peter is not the father.  Peter asks a nurse for a loan so that he can pay his wife’s abortion.
7. By the way, Peter is sleeping with the nurse who unknowingly paid for his wife’s abortion.
8. There’s no way any of this is going to end well.
9. A sex worker comes in to get her appendix removed.  “I love my job,” Fiscus says after telling her to undress.  Ugh, what a pig.  I get that guys say stuff like that when they’re talking to each other and that’s fine but you don’t say that to someone when they’re in terrible pain and in the emergency room.
10. Finally, the show’s best storyline featured Ehrlich going to party at Dr. Craig’s house for a visiting Scandinavian doctor named Sven.  Ehrlich brings Shirley Daniels as his date and proceeds to have way too much to drink.  This storyline was fun because it highlight William Daniels’s wonderfully sardonic portrayal of the abrasive Dr. Craig.  I love that Ehrlich is both terrified of and desperate to impress him.  Drunk Ed Begley, Jr. was definitely this episode’s highlight.

This was an okay episode.  It wasn’t the most memorable that I’ve seen but I did enjoy that terrible party at Dr. Craig’s house.  Terrible parties are always so much more fun to watch than good ones.