Toward the top of the 137th episode of ”St. Elsewhere”-a pick-of-the-litter series that closes down Wednesday night after six years-there is, not surprisingly, the first of several of wink-and-nudge jokes.
Down in the emergency room, Dr. Wayne Fiscus is telling an eye patient, who is named General Sarnoff, ”It`s quite a network. And the optic nerves need the rest. So do your eyes a favor, and cut down on the time you spend in front of the television.”
David Sarnoff, for those in the know, was the so-called ”father of American television,” president and board chairman of RCA and a founder of NBC.
Later, there is an allusion to Floyd the barber on the old ”Andy Griffth Show”-including an atrocious pun involving the words ”may bury”-followed by the appearance of a new first-year resident, Brandon Falsey-an amalgam of either Joshua Brand and John Falsey, creators of ”St. Elsewhere,” or Falsey and Brandon Tartikoff, president of NBC Entertainment.
Cutesy? Even puerile? Of course. But fully expected. ”We did those things for our own enjoyment, and also for the 1 percent of our audience who would get it,” executive producer Bruce Paltrow said in a phone interview last week. ”They were dying for this stuff.”
During other, more-obvious moments in the curtain-time segment (9 p.m. on NBC-Ch. 5), it is business as usual at St. Eligius, the seedy South Boston teaching hospital whose derisive nickname, of course, gives the program its title. The solarium tulips, planted by Dr. Daniel Auschlander, who is also trying to keep the hospital from closing up, finally bloom. A private plane crashes into the place. Before heading off to Nicaragua, Fiscus treats an opera singer who is dressed as a Valkyrie. The reconciliation of surgical chief Mark Craig and wife Ellen is threatened when she accepts a job at a hospital in Cleveland-prompting characteristic caustic comments from her husband, who dismisses the beckoning institution as ”a place where you wouldn`t send Gadhafi`s mother” and the Ohio city as ”a land of billowing smokestacks . . . nose guards . . . Cheez Whiz. . . . . ”
Produced by the company that had turned out ”Hill Street Blues,” ”St. Elsewhere”-which kicked off on a Tuesday night in October of 1982-employed a cinema-verite style and a studied busyness, with overlapping dialogue and storylines and hand-held cameras following the performers down what one patient characterized as ”long corridors filled with sick people . . . angst hanging in the air.”
In many respects, it was a classy, seamless show-the Larry Bird of prime- time drama. There were 12 Emmys, two Humanitas Awards and a Peabody.
”What made it different was that it always had an unpredictability,” says NBC`s Tartikoff. ”So much of television is by the numbers, even the good shows. With `St. Elsewhere,` you never knew whether characters were going to get killed off or fall in love. So much of television is also for middle-of-the-road tastes, but they weren`t afraid to bring dark humor into the proceedings.”
There was the distinctive original theme music, the signature digital-clock in the lower right-hand corner of the screen and the erratic writing, which could be overblown and mawkish but also could be overpoweringly moving, funny and irreverent. Often it played like a sadistic soap opera. To ward off tension, the harried gowned-in-green crew would crack wise in ”M+A+S+H”-like fashion, perhaps referring to the seriously ill elderly as ”Gomers” (for
”Get out of my emergency room”) and then prescribing ”DNR” (Do Not Resuscitate). Sometimes it was simply silly, sometimes simply splendid. In later years, even the most dedicated fans had to concede there was an alarming trend toward titillating and/or absurd plot devices.
Its stories involved bypasses and high jinks, sorrow and scandal, AIDs and adultery, transplants and towering infernos, along with in-vitro fertilization, artificial hearts, lobstermen who formed death pacts, dogs that ate human livers, a Kennedy-like assassination (which infuriated the Boston media), all kinds of dream sequences and even the death of Santa Claus.
Its tools were compassion, pathos, double entendres and latrine humor, and the writers would keep up to date by checking out such periodicals as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and Lancet. This spring`s nude-surgery episode was loosely based on a Swedish study reported in a medical journal that suggested that fewer bacteria would be dispersed by naked operating room personnel than those in scrub clothes.
It was a show to offend, especially those in the medical profession. Earlier this year, the American Association of Neurological Surgeons took MTM Enterprises and NBC to court, seeking $10 million in damages for allegedly portraying the organization as ”devoted to adultery, philandering, male chauvinism and law-breaking.”
”We`d get complaints after every episode,” said Paltrow, now working on a new NBC show called ”Tattinger`s.” ”But we`d get accolades as well. Most of the complaints were about diagnostic procedures. But people are sensitive, and when we`d do jokes about the hospital food, nutritionists threatened to bring a class-action suit. When we`d take a shot at radiologists-saying they have no personalities-right away we`d get letters.”
Like ”Hill Street,” it was a series that was never spectacularly successful with the mass audience and almost was shown the gate early on. Nor was it a universal favorite among the critics. Sniffed one dissenter during the initial year, ”It wears its purple heart a little too showily on its lapel.”
”At the end of the first season it was about to bite the dust,” recalls Tartikoff. ”It had averaged about a 19 share (the percentage of TV sets in use) and we weren`t even considering it for the next season. I remember coming into the staff meeting and asking, `Did anyone see the final episode of ”St. Elsewhere” last night?` And everyone said, `Yeah, yeah, it was good.` I took a count, and something like 9 out of 13 people had seen it.
”I said, `My God, it`s getting a 75 share in this room, and we`re canceling it?` Ironically, we would have kept it going next fall easily, except for the production company`s problems and the new economics of syndication for hour-long shows and all.” (Local syndication rights for ”St. Elsewhere” have been purchased by WGN-Ch. 9.)
The program, in fact, is not being taken off the air because of its outrageous gags or even less-than-dazzling ratings-it again finished the season out of the top 30-but because its producers, MTM Enterprises, were worried about costs and decided to cut bait. ”If it were up to me,” said Paltrow, ”the show would have gone on. It was primarily a financial decision. Absolutely.
”We were never successful in the ratings alongside medical shows like
`Marcus Welby, M.D.,` `Trapper John M.D.` and `Ben Casey,` but we tapped into something that the audience really responded to. It was kind of a confrontational, offbeat, dramatic program, with iconoclastic writing and a juxtaposition of comedy and drama. It had a gallows humor, a foxhole mentality. When you`re dealing with the sick and the dying, you also have the cheap, stupid humor that we put in all the time. And, sure, the dark humor. Like the time Mark Craig`s mother-in-law was mailed the severed head.”
Often labeled a ”dump” and worse, St. Eligius survived the wrecker`s ball and periodic cancellations. It was a place of bad food and good people, where the staff members coveted the facilities and prestige that came from being associated with their onward-and-upward counterpart, Boston General.
Still, many of the original characters survived all six years:
Patriarchal teddy-bear Daniel Auschlander (Norman Lloyd), whose liver cancer, diagnosed on the show`s premiere and long gone into remission, became a kind of storyline standing joke.
Mark (”Oh, for crying out loud”) Craig (William Daniels), the acerbic, solipsistic heart surgeon who treated his patients with the same cool disdain as he treated his pressed-to-the-limits wife (played by Bonnie Bartlett, the real-life Mrs. Daniels), except for that terrible time they were brought close together by the auto-accident death of their drug-addict son.
Pale-skinned patsy Victor Ehrlich (Ed Begley Jr.), who played operating-room Costello to Craig`s Abbott.
Fragile, Job-like Jack ”Boomer” Morrison (David Morse), sufferer of endless tragedies, including rape and kidnaping.
Steady, straight-on Phillip Chandler (Denzel Washington), the black resident who constantly questioned his ability to cut it in a high-powered profession.
The ER`s Wayne Fiscus (Howie Mandel), who had to deal with the possibility of his own death, as well as the actuality of Lainie Kazan as his mother.
Helen Rosenthal (Christina Pickles), who went through breast surgery, chemical dependency, a nurses` strike and four husbands.
Scrappy orderly Luther Hawkins (Eric Laneuville, who often doubled as director), studying by night to become a physician`s aide.
And, almost making it all the way was Donald Westphall (Ed Flanders), the father-figure chief-of-staff who constantly threatened to quit before he actually left and, in the process, made more comebacks than Judy Garland.
Others would show up, beginning with insecure Elliot Axelrod (Stephen Furst), the tubby butt of Fiscus` practical jokes, and moving on to characters like nurse-turned-physician Carol Novino (Cindy Pickett), no-nonsense surgeon Paulette Kiem (France Nuyen) and administrator/corporate hatchetman John Gideon (Ronny Cox).
Others departed along the way, such as in-house lotharios Ben Samuels
(David Birney) and Bobby Caldwell (Mark Harmon), whose face was slashed with a razor blade and who later contracted AIDS; pathologist Cathy Martin
(Barbara Whinnery), who loved to make love in the morgue; and Peter White
(Terence Knox, now of CBS` ”Tour of Duty”), the ski-mask rapist/physician who was killed by a nurse.
There were memorable episodes such as Fiscus` journey through heaven, hell and purgatory-an emotional and theological triumph; the developing relationship between Axelrod and the pesty hypochondriac, Mrs. Hufnagel (the late Florence Halop); the night Auschlander, Craig and Westphall walked into the ”Cheers” bar for a quiet drink and encountered something far worse than a weekend in the emergency room: waitress Carla Tortelli; the dream-experiment sequence in which Ehrlich thought he was being held captive by Amazons; the historymaking Westphall ”mooning”; and that enchanted evening when the resident amnesia patient really believed he was going to make it as Mary Richards after all.
Meanwhile, back in Wednesday night`s finale, Ehrlich returns to his wife, nurse Lucy Papandrao (Jennifer Savidge) after an unlikely sojourn-a surfing safari; Morrison chooses between Novino and his wife back in Seattle; born-again Seth Griffin (Bruce Greenwood) waits for the results of a second AIDS test; Westphall comes back from exile with his autistic son; Gideon ponders a future assignment and Craig barks at recovering addict Rosenthal, ”Why don`t you slide back to the Valley of the Dolls”?
”Ends mean beginnings,” says one character as the hour veers off toward the typically off-center finale. Says another, ”Let`s go home.”
