Retro Television Review: St. Elsewhere 2.10 “A Pig Too Far”

Posted on August 8, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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!

This week, we learn about something called hacking.

Episode 2.10 “A Pig Too Far”

(Dir by Linda Day, originally aired on January 11th, 1984)

I’ve got a family thing going on today so I’m just going to do a bullet-point review.

The bigger, richer hospitals are transporting their indigent patients to St. Eligius. When one of those patients dies, Joan Holloran and Dr. Cavanero (making one of her infrequent appearances) attempt to find out why. It turns out that other hospitals view St. Eligius as being a dumping ground. It’s not ethical or particularly nice but everyone seems to agree that it’s a common practice.
Ehrlich wants to ask Roberta (Jean Bruce Scott) to marry him, despite the fact that he’s extremely immature and has no idea how to have a meaningful relationship with anyone.
Matthew Brody (David Knell) is a teenage computer nerd who, from his hospital bed, is able to hack into the hospital’s computer system. You can tell this episode was from the 80s because of a lengthy scene in which Matthew explains what hacking is. Everyone is stunned that such a thing can be done.
Bobby shaves his mustache. Now he looks like the handsome Mark Harmon we all know!
A woman with violent mood swings is brought into the psych ward. Dr. Ridley diagnoses her as having PMS. He and Dr. Morrison have a good laugh about it while this reviewer narrows her eyes and considers throwing her laptop out the bedroom window.
Shirley and Dr. White are still under investigation. What’s odd is that Shirley says that she’s currently not allowed in the ER but actually, we saw her working in the ER in the previous episode. That leads me to suspect that the episodes were aired out of their extended order.
EXCEPT — last week’s episode was a Christmas episode. This week’s episode features a somewhat random scene of Dr. Craig demanding someone take down a Christmas tree because Christmas is over. So maybe Shirley being in the ER last week was genuine mistake on the part of the writers.

This was a bit of a bland episode, to be honest. At this point, I assume anyone who shows up in the hospital is guaranteed to eventually die a terrible death.

Retro Television Reviews: Gidget’s Summer Reunion (dir by Bruce Bilson)

Posted on December 25, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1985’s Gidget’s Summer Reunion! It can be viewed on Tubi!

Back in the 1970s, when the rest of the country was worrying about political corruption, inflation, and an out-of-touch president with an embarrassing family, Gidget, Jeff, and their friends were carefree California teenagers who spent all of their time either hanging out on the beach or running into the ocean with a surfboard. It was a time when they had not a care in the world and, obviously, it couldn’t last forever.

Nearly 10 years later, Gidget (Caryn Richman) and Jeff (Dean Butler) are now married and their surfboards have been safely stored away in the garage. Jeff works as an architect and it’s obvious that his new boss, Anne (Mary Frann), wants to make their professional relationship into something personal. Gidget, meanwhile, owns her own travel agency and, apparently, it’s a success even though Gidget rarely seems to spend much time at the office. Gidget is hyperactive and a bit self-absorbed and, as such, she usually only shows up at work long enough to tell her employees about her latest problems before then running out of the office in an impulsive attempt to fix everything.

What problems do Gidget and Jeff have? Well, for one thing, they live in a giant house despite the fact that they’re nearly broke. They’re both workaholics and, as a result, they don’t spend as much time together as they used to. They got married and then they became strangers. It’s been years since they last went down to the beach. When Gidget’s niece, Kim (Allison Barron), wants to learn how to surf, it doesn’t even occur to her to ask her aunt or her uncle. Instead, she ends up hanging out with a sleazy, beer-drinking surfer named Mickey (Vincent Van Patten).

Fear not! Gidget has a plan! Jeff’s birthday is coming up and Gidget decides that it would be a great idea to use her travel agent powers to get the entire gang back together again. She wants to bring all of the old surfers back to help celebrate Jeff’s big day. The only problem is that the old gang isn’t entirely easy to find. Plus, one of Gidget’s tour guides has to drop out of leading a tour in Hawaii. Gidget is forced to go in his place. Can she get back from Hawaii in time to save Jeff from Anne and Kim from Mickey? And even more importantly, will she ever be able to track down the old gang? Will the movie end with a bunch of balding guys surfing while the Beach Boys play on the soundtrack? Can you guess the answer?

The best thing that can be said about Gidget’s Summer Reunion is that the beach looked nice and the Hawaii scenes reminded me of the wonderful summer that my family and I spent in Hawaii. And the film is correct when it points out that adulthood is never as easy as we expected it to be when we were teenagers. However, the film suffers from the fact that a lot of Gidget’s problems could have been solved by Gidget actually taking a few minutes to think before acting. It’s one thing to be free-spirited and impulsive. It’s another thing to totally lack common sense. For instance, Gidget and Jeff’s old surfboards are stolen out of the back of Gidget’s convertible and, while you can certainly feel bad for Gidget’s loss, you do have to wonder what she was expecting when she basically just left them out in the open, where anyone could get their hands on them. Jeff isn’t off the hook either, as it was pretty much obvious to everyone but him that Anne was trying to get him to cheat on his wife. Gidget and Jeff are a cute couple but they don’t seem to have a brain cell between them.

Oh well. At least the beach looked nice!

Life is a Beach #4: Spring Break (dir by Sean S. Cunningham)

Posted on March 12, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I think I may have made a mistake. When I started reviewing beach films, I did so because it’s currently spring break for thousands of college students across the country and, right now, they’re all probably having a good time on the beach. Unfortunately, what I didn’t consider was that watching and reviewing these films would make me start to wish that I was currently there with them.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I want to go hang out on the beach and party and flirt and get high and live for the moment and … well, no, actually, that’s exactly what I wish I was doing right now. None of the beach films that I’ve watched so far have been good exactly but they do all get at a larger truth.

We all need some sort of spring break.

That’s certainly the theme of the 1983 comedy, Spring Break.

The heroes of Spring Break

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Spring Break is that, unlike Malibu Beach and The Beach Girls, it was not produced by Crown International Pictures. It certainly feels like a Crown International movie. The film is a largely plotless collection of scenes, all of which take place over the course of spring break in Ft. Lauderdale. It starts out as a comedy and then gets strangely dramatic towards the end. It features a lot of nudity for male viewers but luckily, it has two hot guys for me so it all works out in the end.

Two nerdy students, Nelson (David Knell) and Adam (Perry Lang) go down to Florida for spring break. Nelson does this despite the fact that he had promised that he would spend spring break working on his politically ambitious stepfather’s campaign. When Nelson and Adam’s picture ends up in the paper, Nelson’s stepfather (Donald Symington) sends his operatives down to Florida to basically kidnap Nelson and drag him home. Along the way, the stepfather also somehow gets involved in a plot to take over the motel where Nelson and Adam are staying.

Uhmmm…what?

Yes, it doesn’t make much sense but then again, the plot is never that important in these type of films. What is important is that the motel is overbooked and, as a result, Nelson and Adam find themselves roommates with two hot guys from New York, Stu (Paul Land) and O.T. (Steve Bassett).

One thing that I did like about this movie is that it didn’t waste any time pretending that Stu and O.T. wouldn’t become best friends with Nelson and Adam. Instead, the four of them start bonding as soon as they meet and they were all best friends within the first 15 minutes of the film. Yay for another successful bromance! But seriously, it is kind of sweet.

And it’s also fortunate because, once Nelson is kidnapped and held prisoner on a boat by his stepfather, who better to rescue him than two guys from Brooklyn?

Yes, it’s all pretty stupid but, as far as teen sex comedies from the early 80s are concerned, this is one of the better of them. At the very least, Knell and Lang are both likeable and Land and Bassett are both hot and that really is about the best that you can hope from a film like this. Add to that — and this is a theme that I seem to keep returning to as far as these beach films are concerned — Spring Break is a time capsule. Though Spring Break was released before I was born, I feel like, having seen it, that I now have some firsthand experience of what it was like to be alive in 1983.

So 80s….

As I mentioned at the start of this review, Spring Break feels like a Crown International Picture but, actually, it was released by Columbia Pictures. And it was directed by Sean S. Cunningham, who is probably best known for directing the original Friday the 13th! Harry Manfredini even provided the music for both films. That said, the fun-loving teenagers of Spring Break come to a much happier end than the ones at Camp Crystal Lake.