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.

St. Elsewhere gets political!

Episode 3.19 “Red White Black and Blue”

(Dir by Eric Laneuville, originally aired on February 13th, 1985)

This week, on St. Elsewhere!

• The First Lady is coming to Boston!  Though she’s going to be visiting Boston General, St. Eligius has been designated as a backup hospital.  While she’s in the area, the Emergency Room will be closed to everyone but her.  As well, some members of the hospital staff have been flagged as security risks — including Dr. Craig!
• Dr. Craig is not happy about that but eventually, he’s cleared.  It turns out that his wife was the security risk because she once defended the Black Panther Party.
• Betty White plays Captain Gloria Neal, a doctor who is on the First Lady’s security team.  She is an old friend of Dr. Westphall’s.  At first, it seems like she and Westphall might pursue a romance but it doesn’t happen.  I’m going to guess this is because Gloria realized that Dr. Westphall is the most depressing man on the planet.
• When a severely injured man is rushed to St. Eligius, Neal refuses to open the Emergency Room.  So, Dr. Craig takes it upon himself to overrule her.  The man dies on the table.
• Dr. Jacqueline Wade (Sagan Lewis) follows Captain Neal around, complaining about the president’s policies.  In fact, the entire hospital seems to be full of Democrats!  Wow, this President sure must have been unpopular.  Let’s see who it is …. hey, Ronald Reagan!  Three months before this episode aired, Reagan was reelected with 58% of the vote.  He carried 49 states, including Massachusetts.  Apparently, everyone who voted for Walter Mondale worked at the same hospital.
• Mrs. Hufnagle is back at the hospital.  She is having heart problems.  Dr. Westphall glumly tells the doctors that they have been neglecting her because of her terrible personality.  However, not even Westphall can handle talking to her.  He passes the case over to Dr. Craig.
• Fiscus has dinner with Shirley Daniels, who says that she hopes she goes to prison for shooting Dr. White.  The next day, Shirley is admitted to the hospital with appendicitis.
• Victor Ehrlich wrong believes that a child has been abused by his mother.  He gets social services involved.  Later, Westphall sighs with regret and tells Victor that he did the wrong thing.  Westphall is being kind of a prick here.  Legally, if Ehrlich thinks that there’s been abuse, he’s required to report it.  Westphall seems to be upset that Ehrlich can’t read minds.
• Finally, chronic homewrecker Nurse Rosenthal has to spend the day at the hospital so her lover, Richard, spends the day with her annoying children.  Well, I guess he certainly wasn’t going to spend it with his wife.  I will never understand why this show felt it was necessary to spend so much time with this particular family.  They were all annoying, every single one of them.

This episode opened with a homeless man using an American flag as a blanket and then went on to feature a man selling American flags getting attacked.  That’s about as subtle as things got.  It’s interesting that the show previously established Dr. Craig as being a Republican but apparently, with this episode, viewers were expected to believe that he was not a fan of Ronald Reagan’s.

In other words, this was not a great episode.  This felt like the medical equivalent of one of those Law & Order episodes where all of the salt of the Earth cops start talking about how they never miss Morning Joe.  

Finally, I feel bad for Mrs. Hufnagle,  Even annoying people deserve good medical treatment!