"Television's Second Golden Age" on Google Books Includes Chapter on St. Elsewhere

A must-read for die-hard St. Elsewhere fans: a chapter on the show in Robert J. Thompson's Television's Second Golden Age.

I've mentioned this book on this blog several times, as it's one of the best sources of background information on St. Elsewhere. Robert J. Thompson's Television's Second Golden Age discusses the emergence of the "quality television" movement that grew out of MTM Enterprises and their commitment to sophisticated television in the 1970's.

After I discovered St. Elsewhere in the late nineties and became obsessed with the show, I bought this book, which was published in 1997, as it appeared to be the only book that had any information on the show. It was the first thing I ever bought through the fledgling e-commerce website, Amazon.com.

Thompson, probably the most oft-quoted television scholar, devotes entire chapters to MTM's Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere, and he gives the latter high praise as one of the most significant shows in the history of television for its innovation and envelope-pushing.

Now, thanks to Google Books, you can click the link in this sentence and read the entire chapter on St. Elsewhere for free online. It's a must-read for any St. Elsewhere fan, and it's where I learned to appreciate much of what the show has to offer.

Of course, if you're a fan of great television and curious about where it all came from, I'd encourage you to buy the whole book, especially if you're a fan of Hill Street and other MTM shows.

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.

Daniel Auschlander's Season-Long Slide

Possibly my all-time favourite writing stunt on the show--Daniel Auschlander's mind goes back in time over the entire fifth season.

I first heard of this from Robert Thompson's Television's Second Golden Age, in its chapter on St. Elsewhere. There's a discussion of the show's intricacy and consciousness of its own history, with the McAllister revisit as an example. Then Thompson describes "a second example of St. Elsewhere's attention to detail...so deeply embedded in the scripts that virtually nobody noticed." Tom Fontana recalls:

Dr. Daniel Auschlander (Norman Lloyd) finds
his toys are gone.

In the fifth season, we were going through this story where Auschlander was having this mental breakdown--he was kind of getting senile over the course of the season. We wanted to end the season with him in the hospital saying "Where are my toys?," as a baby again. What we did was--Auschlander was seventy-five, so we divided the twenty-three episodes of the season up into three or four year periods. So in episode number one he was talking about things that related to the year it aired--1986. The next week he would talk about things that related to 1983. The next week he would talk about things related to 1980. We'd try to write in such a way so you couldn't tell if he was just remembering it. By the final episode of that season, when he had been reduced to a baby again, if you'd been tracking it you could see him going bit by bit backward in time. We never even told Norman (Lloyd). My point is that only Masius and I knew what we were doing. We never even told Bruce (Paltrow).

Having just concluded watching season five, I've prepared a "breakdown" of Daniel's journey back through the years:

New York Times Article on the VHS Boxed Set

From 1998, when the videotape boxed set The Very Best of St. Elsewhere was released.

Here's one from the New York Times archives, about how "St. Elsewhere Taught Us To Be Careful Watchers". In particular, this article refers to how season four viewers, watching "Cheek to Cheek", would have to remember how Mr. McAllister (Jack Bannon) ended up in prison for murdering his wife's killer, wannabe radical terrorist Andrew Rhinehardt (Tim Robbins, in one of his first professional roles), all the way back in the series' fourth episode, "Cora and Arnie". Those storylines will eventually receive posts of their own, unless I give this up.

Mr. McAllister (Jack Bannon) spots Footsteps of
Spring, not Johnny Jump-Up, on Dr. Westphall's
native plant poster.

More mention of Robert Thompson's Television's Second Golden Age, which had been published about two years before the boxed set came out. The "careful" watching referred to in the review's title was one of the things I enjoyed about St. Elsewhere when I started watching. Because of Prime's airing schedule in the 90's, I saw the seasons backwards, starting with 6, then 5, then 4, and then 1, 2 and 3. Though many people, when watching a TV show or reading a book, would hear a character refer to an event that happened before and be confused and therefore disenchanted, I've never had that problem. I'd just assume that I was the one who didn't know what was going on, make a reasonable assumption as to what they meant, and go on enjoying the story.

What made St. Elsewhere stand out, even compared to Hill Street Blues, was this awareness of its own history. I have an apparently freakish (I've been told) memory for details, so this kind of stuff really appeals to me. Upon this latest viewing, I've noticed that they don't really start with the references to past episodes until season 4.

Four seasons later, and Drs. Chandler and Kiley are
still debating: Johnny Jump-Up or Footsteps of Spring?

The example Thompson cites in his book is how on the episode following "Cheek to Cheek", Phil is buying flowers for Roxanne, and tells Kiley, "Roxanne loves Johnny Jump-Ups," to which Kiley replies, "too bad, those are Footsteps of Spring". In Cora and Arnie, after Katherine McAllister dies, Mr. McAllister is in Dr. Westphall's office, admiring the native plant poster Lizzie gave him because his office was too stark, and McAllister points at a flower and guesses, "Viola Tri-Color?" Westphall replies, "Johnny Jump-Up," and McAllister looks closer and reads that no, it's Footsteps of Spring. If you remember that scene, you're reminded of the drastic difference between the man then and now.

I received the Very Best of St. Elsewhere boxed set as a Christmas present in 2003, as it was the only legitimate video of St. Elsewhere on the market at the time. The selection of episodes was "Bypass" and "Cora and Arnie" from season one, "Drama Center" from season two, "My Aim Is True" from season three, "Time Heals (Parts 1 & 2)" from season four, "After Life" from season five, and "The Last One" from season six. This selection gives you two key episodes from the Rhinehart/McAllister story, plus the beginning, end, and aftermath of Peter White, ski-masked rapist.

Setting the Record Straight About a Few Things

Comment on a recent article about the show at A.V. Club, which will likely stay in Google's top ten results for "St. Elsewhere" for a while.

In preparing this blog, I came across a recent article about St. Elsewhere, part of a series of articles on A.V. Club where they profile shows that reached the 100-episode mark, which used to be the number after which episodes of a currently-airing show could be sold into syndication. St. Elsewhere celebrated its 100th episode by including a line about a patient named Cindy Kayshun who was still going strong after a hundred episodes of angina.

I take issue with a few things in this article. First of all, the author goes on about how St. Elsewhere stayed on the air because of an innovative strategy of citing demographics to sell the show to advertisers, and it was kept around because of its appeal to the 18-to-49 demographic. Robert Thompson's book, Television's Second Golden Age, tells the story a bit differently. Sure, its audience was skewed towards the 18-to-49's, but what kept it on the air, far from being simply a "vanity" project that "made the network look good", was that the show was actually NBC's fourth-most profitable series by the end of its run. By season six, it had started to win its time slot, climbing to a personal-best #49 in the annual Nielsen rankings. NBC was ready to green-light it for the 1988-89 season, but MTM Productions decided to call it day, as rising production costs and poor syndication sales meant that it would cost them too much to continue making it. Ironic given that they had wrap up most preceding seasons with episodes that could have doubled as series finales because they were perennially on the network's chopping block.

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).