On Call, Vol. 2, No. 2 - Personnel Profile - Tom Fontana: Rebel With a Cause... The Story of Easy Writer

From On Call: The Official Newsletter of the St. Elsewhere Appreciation Club, volume 2, number 2, July 1998.

THE EARLY YEARS

"No profile could ever be completed on Tom - start your article with that, because Tom is an ever-evolving person"... so proclaimed JOHN TINKER, Executive Producer of Chicago Hope and former St. Elsewhere writing partner with Fontana. But the more Tom changes, the more he also stays the same, and to understand that, we begin at the roots of this every growing phenom.

Tom Fontana first "evolved" in 1951 to Charles, a Buffalo wine salesman (and renowned rowing coach) and Marie, who ran the OBGYN office at Millard Fillmore Hospital where Tom was born.

MARIE FONTANA ... "Tom was very pleasant and easy to raise, and seemed to abide by our wishes. We really never had a problem with him. He helped his Dad shovel snow in winter time, and dig up weeds when his Father would take care of the garden. He was also a paper boy. One time we had a terrible snow storm, and his route was about five blocks away from where we lived. We had to drive him in the car because his wagon just couldn't go through the snow."

But whether it was delivering papers in the snow or attending chores, Tom, displayed early on a work ethic beyond his years... something that family and friends attribute in part to the Catholic influence on his education, first by the Sisters of St. Joseph at Cathedral School, and later by the Jesuits at Canisius High. His disciplined manner ever translated to his boyhood hobby and future career... writing.

Tom Fontana Feature from the Baltimore Sun

An article describes "Television's Family Tree"--a group of producers and writers who cut their teeth at MTM in the 80s.

St. Elsewhere writer, producer,
and showrunner Tom Fontana

"The Family Tree" referred to in the title of "Where 'Homeland' fits on 'The Family Tree' of great TV drama" by David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun is a television industry term for a group of a couple of dozen writers  and producers who got their TV training on a pair of MTM shows in the early 1980s: Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere.

Featured prominently in the piece is Tom Fontana, who was a playwright when he was hired as a story editor on St. Elsewhere, rose to become an executive producer and showrunner, and who has since gone on to produce critically acclaimed series such as Homicide: Life on the Street and Oz. The article traces how Emmy-winning writers like Homeland's Henry Bromell and The Wire's David Simon cut their creative chops under the guidance of Fontana on Homicide.

Similarly, a generation of writers emerged from Steven Bochco's Hill Street Blues and his subsequent series, the most successful of which was NYPD Blue.  On page two, the author taps Robert Thompson for a quote, who points out that the credit often given to The Sopranos (1999) as the originator of the quality-premium-cable-TV-drama is better given to Fontana's Oz, which debuted two years prior to The Sopranos, and to Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere and MTM, where writers were the talent, and television drama as rewarding as great literature was the product.

The article goes into more detail than I've delved into here about "The Family Tree" and its indelible imprint on the television landscape we know today, focusing mostly on the Baltimore connection forged by Fontana and Simon. It's a good read for fans of quality television.