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!

This week’s episode of St. Elsewhere featured Dr. Craig winning an award.  Good for him!

Episode 1.5 “Samuels and the Kid”

(Dir by Thomas Carter, originally aired on November 30th, 1982)

This week’s episode of St. Elsewhere was kind of boring,  It wasn’t a bad episode because the show was well-acted and even the boring subplots felt as is they were part of a bigger whole but, especially when compared to last week’s episode, Samuels and the Kid just wasn’t as compelling.

The Kid of the title is Robbie Durant (Jeremy Licht), a young patient who needs to have some minor surgery done on his ankle.  Dr. Samuels take a really intense interest in the kid, bonding with him and even offering him tickets to a Patriots football game.  At first, it seems like Samuels is just trying to be nice to a kid who is in a scary situation.  (When I was growing up, I spent a few nights in the hospital because of my asthma and it always scared me to death.)  But, at the end of the episode, it is revealed that Samuels had a son who was Robbie’s age who died in a freak accident.  As for Robbie, the operation is a success but he still dies as the result of an embolism.  It was sad but, at the same time, I knew Robbie was going to die as soon as he showed up in the hospital.  I’ve seen enough medical shows to know.

Dr. Cavanero was at a bed-and-breakfast when she learned that one of her patients had gone into labor and was at her apartment alone.  Cavenro had to beg people for change so that she could use a pay phone to call the patient’s neighbors so that she could talk them through delivering the baby.  Seen today, the most interesting thing about this storyline is that it takes place at a time when people had to carry around quarters so that they could call each other in case of an emergency.  (There is a very dusty old payphone a few blocks away from my house.  I assume it doesn’t work and I don’t think it’s been touched by human hands since the 90s — and I’m certainly not going to touch it! — but it’s always interesting to see it sitting there like some haunted beacon of the past.)

Dr. Fiscus continued to have sex with Kathy Martin.  Good for them but I really don’t know that I need to spend a good deal of time listening to Howie Mandel talk about his sex life.

Dr. Chandler (Denzel Washington) accused a nurse of being incompetent.  Nurse Rosenthal (Christina Pickles) got mad at him for yelling at the nurse in the hospital hallway.  Dr. Westphall mediated and agreed to move the nurse to another floor.  Denzel Washington is always fun when he’s yelling at people.

There was one very funny scene.  Dr. Craig won an award for surgeon of the year and gave an extremely long, pompous, and rather bitter acceptance speech.  (The award was a plaster cast of his own hands.)  William Daniels played the scene perfectly and I have a feeling that Dr. Craig is going to end up becoming my favorite character.  As a bonus, Daniels’s wife, Bonnie Bartlett, appeared as Craig’s wife.  By the middle of Craig’s speech, even she had stoppled listening and lit a cigarette.

As I said, this was a little bit of a boring episode.   Still, I look forward to the future of the show!

Speaking of the future, this is my last St. Elsewhere review of 2024.  My next review of this show will post on January 3rd!