The Pop Culture Game Show

St. Elsewhere... Where TV went to get pomo, meta, and intertextual.

I have to give credit for a lot of what I'm going to write in this blog (if I keep it up) to professor Robert Thompson, who, if you're going to judge based on who most often gets called to be the expert academic analyst on TV shows about TV, is a leading authority among academics who study television, or in particular, "quality television". Here's another scholar's take on term "quality television", and why he doesn't like it. My opinion is that the "quality television" label is historically situated, and is not just a relational term, but cannot be used as a category beyond the specific time period in which it originated. The TVscape continues to evolve, and old labels and approaches don't apply the way they used to.

After falling in love with St. Elsewhere when I was in high school, I ordered Robert Thompson's book Television's Second Golden Age from Amazon because, according to my web research, it was the only book out there with any significant information about the show. That's probably still the case, and it was published in 1996. The book has a whole chapter devoted to St. Elsewhere, and one to Hill Street Blues as well. What I learned about the show in this book has had a significant impact on how I've experienced the series.

Thompson makes a good case that St. Elsewhere was more than simply "Hill Street in a hospital." The thing that pushed it into a new realm was its writing. The writers took great pleasure in making references to pop culture, particularly television shows. Watching the show was like a dramatic pop-culture game show, and you played by spotting the puns and references. "Intertextuality", or making references to fiction outside of itself, had been around in stories for a long time, but St. Elsewhere took it to extremes never seen before in television, and it's unlikely that any show will attempt to do anything like that again, lest it be accused of trying to re-invent the wheel (a wheel that today's audiences would likely have no interest in).

I think the only reason I even started watching the show was because I had heard of its legendary series finale--the whole series was imagined by an autistic boy who imagined his father and grandfather were the administrative heads of the hospital represented by the small building in his snow globe. The last thing that happens is the boy's father placing the snow globe on top of their television. In a way, St. Elsewhere became a regurgitation of the history of television. I say "became" because it didn't start out that way; the writers increased the "meta" factor as the show progressed. The thing I enjoy about that is that there's no reason for a medical drama that used the Hill Street formula of a large ensemble cast with ongoing soap-style storylines to become a celebration of decades of television culture. However, it kind of makes sense if it was all dreamed up by an autistic child who saw a lot of TV.

Unfortunately, I am too young to be able to recognize all of the references the show makes, because of the limits of television syndication. I didn't get to watch a lot of TV shows from the fifties, sixties and seventies, the ones the writers had consumed and absorbed and even cut their creative teeth on. Many of the ones I get now I get because I read the Thompson book. I never would have known that a character named detective Mike Stone (if I recall correctly, the cop who investigates the murder of Peter White) was a nod to The Streets of San Francisco (1972-77), the Quinn Martin police procedural starring Karl Malden (as Stone) and a young Michael Douglas.

These types of observations are going to depend a lot on my own TV-watching from my childhood. I only know what a Quinn Martin production was because A&E used to show reruns of The Fugitive. Now, if anyone happens to read this blog, and has observations to contribute, please share them through the comments form.

I don't hold out much optimism (I have no idea how long I'll keep this up), but I would love to do at least a bit of justice to what St. Elsewhere has to offer and to express what I enjoyed about watching it, and failing that, I'd love to at least share my appreciation for the culture of television that brought me so much entertainment over the years.

I don't intend to limit my writing to just expounding on Thompson's analysis, but it will definitely be a major influence here. I must confess that I look forward to doing posts whenever I spot one of Thompson' observed references. If you enjoy them--buy the book! I did.