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.
