Retro Television Review: St. Elsewhere 2.1 “Ties That Bind”

Posted on May 23, 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 start season 2!

Episode 2.1 “Ties That Bind”

(Dir by Bruce Paltrow, originally aired on October 26th, 1983)

The second season is here and there are changes to be found in the opening credits.

David Birney and G.W. Bailey are no longer listed in the opening credits. I’m not sorry to see Birney go as Dr. Samuels was never that interesting of a character. I will miss Bailey’s performance as Dr. Beale.

Norman Lloyd is now listed in the credits, appearing right after Ed Flanders. Ellen Bry, Kim Miyori, and Eric Laneuville are also now listed in the opening credits. That’s good. Last season, Shirley Daniels (played by Ellen Bry) was one of the most important characters on the show and it always seemed strange that she was left out of the opening. Mark Harmon, sporting a mustache, appears in the credits, though he didn’t appear in this episode. The final addition to the opening credits is Nancy Stafford, who does appear in this episode.

Stafford plays Joan Halloran, the new city budget advisor who has been assigned to cut St. Eligius’s budget. She tells Westphall and Auschlander that St. Eligius is not popular downtown. “They call you St. Elsewhere,” she says. Joan wants to do away with the animal research lab, which is a part of the hospital that has never been mentioned before. (And with good reason. Boo, animal research, boo!) Westphall finally agrees, on the condition that the city fund Dr. Craig’s attempt to perform a heart transplant on teacher Eve Leighton (Marian Mercer).

Wisely, Dr. Craig gets a lot of screentime in this episode. If the first season seemed to often be unsure of just how abrasive the show should allow Craig to be, the second season premiere would seem to suggest that the show’s writers realized that the more abrasive Craig is, the better. Of course, Dr. Craig has good reason to be in a bad mood. As he confesses to Nurse Rosenthal, he caught his son doing drugs. Craig explains he kicked him out of the house and now, he wants nothing to do with him.

Speaking of drugs, orderly Luther (played by Eric Laneuville) finally manages to capture the thief who has been stealing all the drugs from the hospital. Dr. White is no longer under suspicion! Yay, I guess. I don’t know. Dr. White wasn’t in much of this episode but he still cames across as being a jerk. I have to admit that I groaned a little when I saw he was still on the show. A part of me is hoping he’ll get a redemption arc this season but, from his behavior during rounds, he still seems to be a jackass.

Speaking of jackasses, when Jerry Singleton (Alan Arkin) discovers that his wife, Fran (Piper Laurie), has had a stroke, he responds by crashing his car into the ER and then refusing to leave the doctors along while they try to save his wife’s life. Jerry is convincing that he knows everything and he’s very demanding. Naturally, Fran’s doctor is Jack Morrison because Morrison always gets the really depressing cases. Fran does wake up from her coma but she neither speaks no seems to hear anything anyone says to her. I can’t imagine this is going to end well, mostly because she’s Morrison’s patient and things never seem to go well when Morrison is involved. (What’s really sad is that Morrison, unlike Peter White, is a good doctor! He just has rotten luck.)

Shirley Daniels finds out that Fiscus is cheating on her with Kathy Martin, who spends most of this episode promoting cryogenics. Shirley responds by dumping Fiscus and telling him that he’s a pig. Fiscus tells Kathy that they no longer have to sneak around, just for Kathy to say that the sneaking around was the whole point. She promptly dumps Ficus.

Finally, Dr. Ehrlich meets a woman, Bobbi (Jean Bruce Scott) at the laundromat. They go back to her apartment. She strips down to her underwear. She has Ehrlich tie her to the bed. Ehrlich realizes that he has to get something from his car so he runs outside and …. gets locked out. And then he nearly gets arrested while trying to use his credit card to open the building’s door. However, the next day, Bobbi shows up at the hospital for her “encounter group,” and the two of them are reunited. Again, I have a feeling this is not going to end well, just because it involves Dr. Ehrlich.

Hey, this episode was pretty good! It moved quickly, it reintroduced us to the cast, and all of the stories were actually fairly interesting. It’s obvious that show’s producers paid attention with what didn’t work during season one and they made an effort to improve things with season two. Compared to the majority of this first season’s episodes, the pace was quicker, the humor was sharper, and just about everyone got a moment or two to shine. I’m looking forward to next week!

October Positivity: The Wager (dir by Judson Pearce Morgan)

Posted on October 1, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2007’s The Wager, Randy Travis plays Michael Steele, an Oscar-nominated actor who….

Stop laughing, that’s not nice.

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that Randy Travis is not exactly the first person that I would cast as an Oscar-nominated actor. And, I’ll also be the first to admit that having Randy Travis act in this film makes it even harder to believe him as someone who could someday be nominated for an Oscar. A lot of country music stars have tried their hand at acting and most of them have been able to survive on the basis of their own authenticity. But there’s nothing authentic about Travis’s performance here. Even when he picks up a guitar and sings a song about the difficulties that he’s facing, he’s not convincing. In this, it’s not so much that Travis is a stiff actor as he just seems to evaporate whenever he’s on screen.

As for the film, Michael Steele is an actor who is known for his strong faith and his refusal to do sex scenes. When a director (Bronson Pinchot) throws a fit over Steele’s refusal to shoot once such scene, Steele says that he’ll do the scene but only if it’s followed by a scene in which his co-star has to deal with being a single mother. OUCH! Michael Steele seems like he’s fun at parties….

(Apparently, it doesn’t occur to Michael that his character could wear a condom.)

Wait a minute. This guy has the same name as that jackass who is always on the news talking about how he’s a Republican who thinks everyone should vote for the Democrats. I wonder if that’s intentional. Anyway….

Michael Steele’s career has had its up and downs. His recent divorce from Annie (Nancy Stafford) has damaged his family friendly image. But his Oscar nomination and the fact that he’s expected to win has once again made the world’s most popular star. But then — scandal! A tabloid photographer snaps a picture of Michael talking to a young actress at his house. In the background, a little kid watches. Now, the kid is a part of the Big Brother program and Michael was just trying to help the younger woman with her career but it doesn’t matter. Soon, Michael finds himself being portrayed as being some sort of pervert. When he punches a photographer, he finds himself getting arrested — RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIS CHURCH!

Now, as you may have guessed, this is yet another retelling of the story of Job, with Michael having his faith tested by one disaster after another. He doesn’t lose his faith and, as a result, he wins both an Oscar and he also becomes a hero when he rescues the kid from the Big Brother program from his abusive stepfather. Anyone who thinks that God wouldn’t have a hand in who wins an Oscar obviously did not listen to Will Smith’s acceptance speech.

The Wager is a film that would probably not be made today. Today, you’re not likely to see a socially conservative, faith-based film where a successful actor is wrongly accused of being a pervert. Then again, you also probably wouldn’t see a politically liberal film in which a successful white male actor was wrong accused of being an abuser, not in today’s cultural climate. On both the Left and the Right, attitudes towards Hollywood have changed. Beyond the film’s political and cultural subtext, its portrait of the Oscars as being the most important event of the year also feels rather old-fashioned. I imagine it felt old-fashioned in 2007 as well….

Then again, this is a film in which Randy Travis plays the best actor of his generation so perhaps it’s best not to take any of it too seriously. The miscasting of Travis pretty much sabotages the movie from the start but, on the positive side, Bronon Pinchot is amusing as a bitchy director and Jude Ciccolella has a few good scenes as Michael’s supportive agent. Give those men an Oscar!

Retro Television Reviews: Half Nelson Episode 1.4 “Uppers and Downers”

Posted on April 7, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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 Half Nelson, which ran on NBC from March to May of 1985. Almost all nine of the show’s episodes can be found on YouTube!

The adventures of Rocky Nelson continue!

Episode 1.4 “Uppers and Downers”

(Dir by James Sheldon, originally aired on April 5th, 1985)

When a burglar alarm goes off in Beverly Hills, it’s Rocky Nelson (Joe Pesci) of Beverly Hills Patrol to the rescue! Reaching the mansion of a local businessman (played by Cliff Gorman), Rocky discovers that the alarm was set off by a racoon.

(“A racoon is Beverly Hills!?” Gorman’s wife says, in a tone that suggests that racoons are unknown creatures in California.)

Rocky also happens to spot the next door neighbor (Nancy Stafford) leading her personal trainer into her house, whispering that she’s going to show him her bedroom. At first, Rocky is amused but, later that day, Rocky hears that the personal trainer has been found, floating in Stafford’s swimming pool. Stafford claims that the trainer had a heart attack while swimming but, upon arriving at the scene, Rocky immediately figures out that the trainer died in the house and was then dragged out to the pool. Stafford swears that she didn’t kill him and Rocky believes her. However, when the autopsy report reveals that the trainer was dead before he was put in the pool, Stafford is arrested and charged with murdering him by hitting him over the head.

Despite being told by his boss (Fred Williamson) to stay away from the case, Rocky feels that he has to prove Stafford’s innocence. Rocky’s first plan is to have his associates, Kurt (Bubba Smith) and Beau (Dick Butkus), disguise themselves as mortuary attendants and steal the trainer’s body from the crematorium. Rocky then takes the body to a coroner who does a second autopsy and discovers that not only did the trainer have a heart attack but that he was also poisoned! Someone slipped the trainer a pill that was specifically designed to cause a heart attack. Now, it’s up to Rocky to discover who that person was and clear Stafford’s name before Stafford’s husband (Brett Halsey, a veteran of Italian horror and spaghetti westerns) files for divorce.

Rocky deduces that the trainer was probably targeted by a jealous husband. Rocky decides to disguise himself as a physical trainer so that he can get close to all of the dead man’s former clients. How does Rocky prepare for this role? He does calisthenics with his landlord, Dean Martin. When Rocky mentions that he needs someone to determine whether or not his clients are lying to him, Dean Martin suggests that he steal a lie detector from the set of “Burt’s new film.” (I’m guessing that Burt was a reference to Burt Reynolds, Dean’s co-star in two Cannonball Run films.) Rocky promptly goes down to the studio backlot and steals a bunch of Burt Reynolds’s property.

(The backlot was a prominent and amusing part of the show’s pilot but it was ignored during last week’s episode. I was glad to see it back for this episode because Dean Martin instructing Joe Pesci to steal Burt Reynolds’s lie detector will never not be amusing.)

Rocky meets with all of the dead trainer’s clients and tricks them into hooking themselves up to the lie detector by telling them that it’s a instrument that will check their heart rate. Rocky discovers that any number of people could have wanted the trainer dead. However, those of us in the audience already knows that Cliff Gorman is the murderer because we witnessed Gorman gloating about it earlier in the episode. Rocky eventually figures it out as well and tricks Gorman into confessing by pretending to take one of the heart attack pills while driving Gorman around Beverly Hills.

Thanks to the visit to the studio lot and Dean Martin’s eccentric performance, this episode was an improvement on last week’s. That said, it still suffered from the fact that the murder itself wasn’t that interesting (with Gorman’s ruthless businessman not getting much characterization beyond being evil). Despite being second and third-billed in the opening credits, neither Victoria Jackson nor Fred Williamson got to do much in this episode and considering that both of those performers had their own unique and eccentric style, it feels like a bit of waste to just have them sitting in the office and uttering just a handful of lines per episode. The main appeal of the show continues to be Joe Pesci, who brings a lot of streetwise charm to Rocky. In the episodes that I’ve watched so far, Pesci is likable and engaging as Rocky and I think his performance would surprise a lot of people who are used to Pesci playing killers with hair-trigger tempers. Rocky is smart and tough but ultimately rather friendly. In his performance in Half Nelson, one can see hints of his later performance in The Irishman, I just wish the rest of this show was as consistently good.

Next week: Joe Pesci faces off against John Saxon! That sounds promising! We’ll see how it goes.