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, it snows in Boston.
Episode 2.11 “Blizzard”
(Dir by Kevin Hooks, originally aired on January 18th, 1984)
It can’t be easy working in a hospital.
I’m thinking about this today because my aunt is currently dying. After several years of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, my aunt is currently in a hospital, unresponsive and scheduled to move into hospice care. Presbyterian Health was the first hospice we reached out to. They don’t have any available rooms but they were willing to still admit her and send their nurses to the hospital everyday until a room opened up, One family would lose a loved one and my aunt would get a room. However, the hospital says that they need the bed that my aunt is occupying so my aunt is being sent to a different hospice. This hospice is located off the highway and it’s going to be Hell to get to. I yelled at the hospital social worker for an hour this morning. He suggested home hospice as a solution but home hospice is what I agreed to for my Dad last year and the pain from watching him die still lingers.
It’s easy to get angry at the doctors and the nurses and the hospice workers but I try not to. I’m losing my aunt, a woman who stepped up to look after me after my mom died. They’re losing one of the hundreds of patients that they deal with on a daily basis. That social worker upset me but ultimately, he was doing his job.
All of this was pressing on my mind as I watched this week’s episode of St. Elsewhere. Even though this episode was aired 41 years ago, it still felt relevant today. A patient — a nice old man named Harrison Jeffries (James McEachin) — died because a teenage girl hacked the hospital’s computer, screwed with the files for fun, and accidentally erased the fact that Harrison was allergic to Demerol. It was sad but it was also something that still happens today. People, both good and bad, go into hospitals for minor procedures and concerns and they don’t come out. Last year, my Dad went to the hospital because he was in a car accident and when I first visited him, he seemed like he was doing fine. Three months later, he died because the accident aggravated his Parkinson’s. It sucks and it hurts but that’s the way it is. Tomorrow, I could forget to pack my inhaler when I leave the house and I could die of an asthma attack. It’s not nice to think about but it could happen. That’s why you have to truly live life while you can. You never know when it might be taken away.
As for the rest of this episode, it dealt with a blizzard. The roof collapsed on Dr. Cavanero and she ended up with a broken arm. Dr. Craig tried to drive to the hospital and, after his car stalled, nearly died walking through the snow. (Vijay was able to warm up Craig’s feet by placing them on his stomach. Craig was not happy.) Victor struggled with his love for Roberta. Dr. Armstrong snapped at people. Jack Morrison was depressed. Even with this blizzard, it was really just another day at St. Eligius.
St. Elsewhere is frequently downbeat show but that makes sense. When you think about, no one ever gets a happy ending.
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!
Oddly enough, this week’s episode is not available on Hulu. I had to purchase it on Prime. I’m not really sure why this episode — and apparently this episode alone — wouldn’t be on Hulu. The world of Streaming is a strange and arbitrary place.
Episode 1.8 “Tweety and Ralph”
(Dir by Mark Tinker, originally aired on December 20th, 1982)
Dr. Craig is still trying to track down the mysterious Dr. Barnum, the man who says that he’s interested in Craig’s convertible. Dr. Craig is constantly getting messages from Barnum. He’s constantly hearing Barnum being paged on the PA. Craig has become obsessed with tracking down the elusive Dr. Barnum.
Of course, Dr. Barnum does not exist. What started as a practical joke on the part of Dr. Samuels has grown into a hospital-wide conspiracy of people playing with the emotions of the pompous and prickly Dr. Craig. Craig is so obsessed with selling his car that he even cuts his hand while working on the engine. Finally, Dr. Craig’s wife, Ellen (played by William Daniels’s real-life wife, Bonnie Bartlett), confronts Samuels and tells him that she knows what he’s doing. When Samuels hears that Craig cut his hand, he feels guilty. He knows how important a surgeon’s hands are. Samuels finally works up the courage to tell Craig the truth. Craig laughs. And then he punches out Dr. Samuels.
And you know what? Dr. Samuels totally deserved it. Good for you, Dr. Craig!
(Everyone seems to have forgiven Dr. Samuels for causing a VD break-out during the pilot. They’re very forgiving at St. Eligius.)
Meanwhile, the Legionnaire’s outbreak is finally contained, with the culprit being one dirty shower head. Ward 5 is re-opened! Yay! Dr. Westphall celebrates his victory but still comes across as being the most depressed man on the planet. While that goes on, Dr. Fiscus reveals that he now carries a gun so he won’t get mugged in the ER again and Dr. Cavanero considers her decision to devote her life to her career when a friend check into the hospital for hysterectomy.
That said, the majority of the episode centered around Ralph (Richard Marcus) and Jane (Laraine Newman), two psychiatric patients. Jane is pregnant and Ralph is the father. Ralph is a genius who graduated at the top of his class from MIT and who invented his own personal computer. Unfortunately, he also thinks that he’s a bird and has been stealing medical supplies to build a giant nest in one of the supply closets. Jane wants to marry Ralph but, when she and Ralph go out to dinner with Dr. Beale, Jane can only watch in horror as Ralph panics at the sight of a cat. “Caw! Caw!” Ralph shouts as he jumps up on a chair. The cat, for its part, just looks confused.
In other words, the marriage is off. Jane tells Ralph that she’ll always love him but that she can’t be with him anymore. The episode ends with a close-up of Ralph intensely staring at the camera. Uh-oh, that doesn’t look good….
This was a weird but ultimately effective episode. I really shouldn’t have been as emotionally moved as I was by Ralph and Jane’s story. Ralph’s behavior was more than a little cartoonish. But, I have to admit that I felt really sad as Jane said goodbye to Ralph. Richard Marcus and Laraine Newman did such a good job playing the characters that I couldn’t help but be sad that things weren’t working out for them.
Oh well. I guess that’s just another day at St. Eligius….
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a new 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!
When I started reviewing Homicide, Jeff suggested that I should also review St. Elsewhere because the two shows shared a similar sensibility and a lot of behind-the-scenes personnel. (Homicide showrunner Tom Fontana started out as a writer on St. Elsewhere.) Apparently. a few characters from St. Elsewhere would eventually cross-over to Homicide. Since I’m planning on soon reviewing two shows that were descended from Homicide — Oz and The Wire — it only seemed right to also review a show that was Homicide’s ancestor.
Though the show aired largely before my time, St. Elsewhere is definitely a show that I have heard about. Everyone who follows American pop culture has either read about or seen the show’s infamous final episode and knows about the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis. Obviously, I can’t get into it now because that would be a spoiler but we’ll discuss it when the time comes!
For now, let’s start at the beginning, with the pilot!
Episode 1.1 “Pilot”
(Dir by Thomas Carter, originally aired on October 26th, 1982)
St. Eligius is a hospital in Boston that has obviously seen better days. From the outside, it looks old. On the inside, the hallways have the dim and dull look of a building that hasn’t been renovated in over ten years. As Dr. Mark Craig (William Daniels, long before he played Mr. Feeney on Boy Meets World) angrily puts it, the hospital gets no respect in Boston. It’s seen as being a “dumping ground” for patients who can’t afford anything better. Dr. Craig is world-renowned heart surgeon whose wealthy patients have donated what few improvements the hospital has seen over the past few years. (“All of our clocks now read the same time!” Dr. Craig brags at one point.) But not even Dr. Craig can change the hospital’s reputation as being secondary to Boston General.
There are actually a few good things about St. Eligius. For one thing, a young Denzel Washington is on staff, playing resident Phillip Chandler. Denzel doesn’t get to do much in the pilot but still, his presence fills the viewer with confidence. St. Eligius is also home to a world-renowned liver specialist, Dr. Daniel Auschlander (played by Norman Lloyd, who also worked with Hitchcock and Orson Welles). Auschlander has liver cancer but the hospital chief-of-staff, Dr. Donald Westphall (Ed Flanders), assures everyone that Auschlander will probably “out live us all.” (And he was right, to an extent. Norman Lloyd lived to be 106 years old before passing away in 2021. Ed Flanders died, tragically by suicide, in 1995.) St. Eligius is a teaching hospital and the residents want to make a good impression by keeping their patients alive. That’s always a good thing.
At the same time, how secure can you feel when Howie Mandel is one of the residents? Mandel plays Dr. Wayne Fiscus, who wears a baseball cap and acts …. well, he acts a lot like Howie Mandel. Like Washington, Mandel doesn’t do a lot in the pilot. He does get a subplot where he apparently has sex in the morgue with goth pathologist Cathy Martin (Barbara Whinnery) but otherwise, we don’t see him treating a patient or anything like that. Still, it’s a bit jarring to see Howie Mandel as a doctor. I would not necessarily want him for my doctor because he’s to be easily distracted. Maybe he’ll change my mind as the series progresses.
Speaking of sex, Dr. Ben Samuels (David Birney) has gonorrhea and spends most of the pilot approaching doctors and nurses and informing them of his conditions and suggesting that they might want to get tested themselves. That’s not exactly the best way to be introduced to a character but it also lets us know that this show is not just going to be about dedicated doctors who spend all of their time worrying about their patients and making amazing medical discoveries. Instead, this show is also about doctors who get venereal diseases. Has anyone checked on Fiscus in the morgue?
(That said, Dr. Samuels does get a scene where he saves the life of a woman who was injured in a terrorist bombing, as if the show does want to make sure that we know that he can do his job, even if he is spreading VD through the hospital.)
The majority of the episode follows Dr. Jack Morrison (David Morse), a first-year resident who has been working several 24-hour shifts and who complains, at one point, that he hasn’t seen his wife for days. Dr. Morrison gets upset when a surgeon wants to operate on one of his patients, a 15 year-old girl named Sandy (Heather McAdams). Morrison believes that surgeons always want to cut into somebody. Morrison gets even more upset when Sandy’s mother requests that Sandy be transferred to Boston General, which has a reputation for being a better, more modern hospital. In fact, Morrison is so upset and exhausted that he forgets to file a death certificate for a patient who dies during the night. As a result, it’s believed that the patient, who has a reputation for being violent, has gone missing and is stalking the hospital. Dr. Annie Cavanero (Cynthia Sikes) spends the entire episode looking for a dead man, which at least gives her an excuse to visit every ward and introduce the viewers to the members of the show’s ensemble cast.
Having lost my mom to cancer and now my Dad to Parkinson’s, I was hesitant about reviewing St. Elsewhere. (Actually, I was hesitant about reviewing any medical show.) When my Dad was in the hospital, I felt like I couldn’t get anyone to give me a straight answer about his condition and I often felt the doctors were talking down to me. To be honest, my worst conflicts were with the nurses, one of whom told me that I would have to “lose the attitude” before she would explain why my father had been moved to the Delirium Ward. (It didn’t help that, at the same time my Dad was in the hospital, there was a huge storm that left us without power for a week.) At the same time, there were other doctors who were helpful. The staff at the rehab center that my dad was sent to were also wonderful. I have my regrets about agreeing to hospice care but the nurse who was assigned to my Dad was very empathetic and totally understanding whenever I asked her for a cigarette. (Under normal circumstances, I don’t smoke because I have asthma but seriously, the stress was killing me.) I’m bitter and angry about a lot of what happened but I’m also thankful for the small moments of kindness.
Watching a show set in a hospital was not easy for me but the pilot of St. Elsewhere appealed to me with its mix of melodrama and humor. There was a quirkiness to it that I appreciated. William Daniels made me laugh with his annoyed rant about how little respect the hospital received. Most of all, I cared about whether or not Dr. Morrison would still be alive at the end of his shift. David Morse’s performance won me over. He’s the type of doctor that I would want to have. Well, actually, I’d probably want Denzel to my doctor but Dr, Morrison could assist. Just keep Dr. Howie Mandel away from me. Nothing against him but he seemed to be having way too much fun at the hospital….
Through the Shattered Lens 