Lily Mariye | Through the Shattered Lens

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 Daily Motion.

This week, it’s a busy few days in Boston.

Episode 4.5 “Slice O’Life”

(Dir by Eric Laneuville, originally aired on November 6th, 1985)

Oh, the drama!

Elliot is still struggling to lose weight.

Fiscus is having an early midlife crisis, especially when a cancer patient (Todd Susman) philosophically accepts that the treatment is going to leave him impotent. The patient has lived a life with meaning. What has Fiscus done?

Dr. Craig finally admits to Ellen that he knows he was too hard on their now dead son. They are both preparing to raise their granddaughter, Barbara, in their home. However, Yvonne’s parents (Ramon Bieri and K Callan) arrive in Boston for a visit. They are so blue collar and, in Dr. Craig’s eyes, unsophisticated that they almost seems like caricatures of what the rich think the poor are like. They reveal that Stephen and Yvonne asked them to serve as Barbara’s legal guardians in case anything happened. At first, Ellen refuses to let them take Barbara. “Get your wife in check,” Yvonne’s father says. “I’ll see you in court,” Dr. Craig replies.

After complaining about feeling like he has a cold and then getting upset about the Hospital Board not immediately approving all of his projects, Dr. Westphall collapses in the St. Eligius stairwell. It turns out that he has Malaria. Apparently, a self-righteous attitude and a bunch of impractical ideas were not the only things Westphall brought home from Ethiopia.

Finally, Bobby spends another weekend up at Cape Cod. He picks up a local woman. They have what Bobby is probably expecting to be just another one night stand. The woman, however, has a razor blade that she’s hidden under her tongue (yikes!) and proceeds to slice Bobby across his face.

AGCK!

Up until that ending, this was a fairly typical episode of St. Elsewhere. It looked like the big drama was going to be the Craigs temporarily losing Barbara. Instead, the drama is that Bobby might be dead!

Oh, poor Mark Harmon. When he first started playing the role on this show, Bobby was portrayed as being a nice guy who was a little boring. The show really had no idea what to do with him, other than have him occasionally take his shirt off. For the fourth season, the show’s writers turned him into an arrogant hedonist. On the one hand, I’m sure there are a lot of doctors like Bobby Caldwell. On the other hand, the change really does seem to have come out of nowhere. And now, he might be dead. I guess the lesson here is to stay away from Cape Cod!

The attack on Bobby ultimately overshadows everything else that happened in this episode. I will say that, before Bobby got attacked, I was enjoying Dr. Craig’s rather snobbish reaction to Yvonne’s parents. As for Dr. Westphall …. eh. Westphall’s kind of become a one trick pony. He’s depressed and he wants the world to know it. I know quite a few people like Dr. Westphall in real life, which is probably why I get so annoyed with his character on the show.

Seriously, Westphall, cheer up!

Strange movie, Ted & Venus.

Actor Bud Cort (you remember him from Harold and Maude) both directs and stars as Ted. Ted is a homeless poet who lives on the beach and only has one friend, a mellow beach bum named Max (Josh Brolin). Kim Adams plays Linda, who is the Venus of the title, a social worker who has a bodybuilder jerk for a boyfriend (Brian Thompson, who you might remember as the main villain in Cobra). When Ted sees Linda, it is love at first sight and at first, the movie seems like it is going to be a quirky romantic comedy where Ted eventually wins Linda over. When Linda turns down Ted’s advances, Ted does not give up. Instead, Ted starts following her everywhere and making harassing phone calls. Ted starts out as a nuisance and goes on to become a full-out stalker. Everyone, even Max, tells Ted to stop bothering Linda but he is convinced that he can make her fall in love him. He’s wrong.

Because of the presence of Cort both in front of and behind the camera, Ted & Venus sometimes seems like Harold and Maude: The Later Years. Harold, the iconoclast that everyone loved, has grown up and become Ted, the unemployable stalker. It’s an interesting idea and Cort pulls it off as an actor but not as a director. You have to admire Cort’s devotion to his vision but it’s impossible to be certain what that vision was because the film’s tone is all over the place. Cort gets a far better performance from himself than he does from the rest of the cast.

Speaking of the cast, the movie is full of familiar faces. In fact, there are almost too many familiar faces. It’s hard not to get distracted by all of the cameos. If you somehow see this obscure movie, keep an eye out for: Woody Harrelson (who gets two lines and five seconds of screen time), Rhea Pearlman, Carol Kane, Martin Mull, Gena Rowlands, Pat McCormick, Vincent Schiavelli, Cassandra Peterson, and Andrea Martin. When Ted is hauled into court, charged with stalking, the judge is played by LSD guru Timothy Leary. I am not sure what Ted & Venus was trying to say but Bud Cort assembled an impressive cast to say it.