On Call, Vol. 1, No. 1 - Club, Newsletter Celebrate St. Elsewhere Anniversary!

From On Call: The Official Newsletter of the St. Elsewhere Appreciation Club, February 1997, volume 1, number 1.

Welcome to the premiere issue of "ON CALL", the official newsletter of the St. Elsewhere Appreciation Club. First of all, SEAC is NOT a traditional fan club. Our founding members are business owners, medical professionals, broadcast veterans and others who are committed to keeping St. Elsewhere on the air, including helping to grow the subscriber base for Nick at Nite's TV LAND channel.

SEAC members will not be asked to organize conventions and dress up as characters from the show. Instead we will be focused on access to, awareness of, and appreciation for a television series that provided not only quality entertainment, but also had a pro-active, positive impact on quality of life, through its treatment of medical and social issues.

Of course, SEAC will be a vehicle for baby boomers to celebrate the series and to stay current with news of cast and crew. In so doing those of us in our 40's and 50's will also try to encourage membership and viewership by a whole new generation of St. Elsewhere fans. So scrub up and enjoy our first issue of "ON CALL", in this the year of St. Elsewhere's 15th Anniversary!

Originally produced by Longworth Communications.

Very Special Thanks to Friends of the St. Elsewhere Experience

I am indebted to Ben Douwsma for filling out my video collection and Chris Otto for On Call: The St. Elsewhere Appreciation Club newsletter.

One of the best things about blogging is interacting with people who share your interests. That's especially valuable when there isn't much out there about your interest, like in the case of St. Elsewhere. That was one of the reasons I started this blog--to share what I had learned. From what I could tell, there weren't any other active sites devoted to compiling phenomena about the show.

So I am especially grateful to have been graced by the generosity of new St. Elsewhere friends. Last year, I wrote a post about the three episodes in my collection where the soundtrack failed. A fan named Ben Douwsma read the post, contacted me and offered to send me a DVD containing his copies of the episodes I was missing. I reciprocated by filling the holes in his collection. Thank you very much, Ben, for helping complete my episodes.

On Call: The St. Elsewhere Appreciation Club
newsletter.

The other wonderful thing that happened recently comes courtesy of Chris Otto, whose blog Papergreat was featured in an early post on this blog. He had written a post in celebration of St. Elsewhere's 29th birthday in October of 2011, and that's where I first learned of The St. Elsewhere Appreciation Club and its newsletter, On Call. It was produced for seven issues in the late 1990s by James L. Longworth, Jr., and featured several pieces that involved interviews with cast and crew.

Chris had copies of the seven issues, and upon connecting with the St. Elsewhere Experience, he graciously offered to send me photocopies of the newsletters. I am pleased to announce that these copies arrived in the mail recently.

I will be transcribing these newsletters one article at a time, and I will be adding a page that compiles links to all the articles in each issue. These are truly a treasure trove of St. Elsewhere trivia and stories, and I'm pleased to have the opportunity to share them with the world.

So thanks to Ben, I will now be able to offer a complete picture of season six. You just can't miss episodes of St. Elsewhere and get the whole experience, especially given how often characters refer to events that happened in previous episodes. They amped up this approach as the series progressed, I think. I haven't counted how often that happens or anything like that. (I really ought to start a list of things to look for the next time I run through the series.)

And thanks to Chris, we'll all get to enjoy the great stories, trivia and behind-the-scenes information that James L. Longworth assembled in On Call. To honor their contributions, I have given them a permanent tribute in the right sidebar, in a new section called Friends of the St. Elsewhere Experience.

Also, I'd like to thank everyone who has been leaving comments lately. It's always great to hear from other fans. Your voices make the site better!

A Response to the Question, "Should I Give St. Elsewhere a Chance?"

To those who have heard about the show and wonder what the big deal was--here's what to look for in watching St. Elsewhere.

A scene from season one, the Joshua Brand-John Falsey era.

A while back, I came across a discussion forum for former St. Elsewhere showrunner Tom Fontana's gritty 90s police drama, Homicide: Life on the Street where a poster, underwhelmed by the episode of St. Elsewhere he caught in reruns, asked other posters if it's worth watching more of the show. I can't find the post anymore, so it could be gone. If anyone tracks it down, they are welcome to post the link in the comments section.

Then recently, I got a Google Alert for a similar page on Reddit, where a user asked if the two Joshua Brand-John Falsey creations St. Elsewhere and Northern Exposure were worth watching all the way through.

I posted my response on the Reddit page. You might not expect this from the proprietor of a fan site, but I wouldn't recommend the show to everyone. It's really not for everyone's tastes or sensibilities. But if you get it, the show's pretty damn good.

If you're here on this website, odds are you that have watched St. Elsewhere and are looking to have your memory refreshed. So I don't need to preach to the choir. One thing to consider is that it's not easy to even see the show. You can watch it on Channel 4OD in Britain, but not in North America. There are only a few cable channels that show reruns (including iChannel in Canada).

On DVD, you can buy the first season, which I feel to be the weakest and not really representative of what made St. Elsewhere special, but not seasons two through six, where the show takes off. If you're not inclined to buy bootleg DVDs of the complete series, you can't access it.

If you're open to watching television from a bygone era and you like getting hooked on a series with continuing storylines and long-range character development, St. Elsewhere is quite rewarding. If you've got a quirky sense of humor, relatively sophisticated cultural sensibilities, and knowledge of baby boomer culture, there's a lot to like.

Denzel Washington, Stephen Furst, and Howie Mandel as
doctors Chandler, Axelrod and Fiscus.

If not, you might at least be interested to see a medical show where Denzel Washington, Mark Harmon and Howie Mandel were some of the doctors on staff. I would hope that's at least slightly interesting. I think it's a damn strange mix of actors, but not really, considering they were basically unknowns before St. Elsewhere.

If you like weird or crazy stuff happening, St. Elsewhere has a lot of that:

• A patient dies folded up in a hospital bed ("crushed like a clam")
• A doctor's wife slips in the tub and dies, and her heart ends up in a transplant patient in the hospital
• One of the doctors commits a string of rapes and is murdered by a vigilante
• A doctor gets shot and spends an episode in the afterlife, where he runs into dead characters
• A doctor accidentally kills his mother-in-law by sending her a severed head in the mail and inducing a heart attack
• A doctor's parents, previously thought to be dead, turn out to have been spies captured in the Bay of Pigs invasion
• A male doctor gets raped in a prison riot, and is stalked by the assailant after his release
• A mercy killer stalks the hospital and is never caught
• The whole show turns out to be a fantasy dreamed up by an autistic child who watches a lot of TV

St. Elsewhere's dialogue is filled with puns, inside jokes, and references to pop culture, often thrown into serious scenes; guest stars frequently have lines that refer to their other work. In their biggest stunt casting move, they cast five of the original Tonight Show players as parents of the residents: Steve Allen, Jayne Meadows, Bill Dana, Louis Nye, and Tom Poston.

The show celebrated the tragedies and triumphs of life, commented on religion and politics, and explored the challenges and limitations of healthcare. It's as rich as a great novel, and was widely honored for its writing, including two Emmys and a Peabody. And there are a ton of great acting performances from cast and guest stars. Emmy awards for acting were bestowed upon Ed Flanders, James Coco, Doris Roberts, William Daniels and Bonnie Bartlett, and nominations went to Ed Begley, Jr., Christina Pickles, Piper Laurie, Alfre Woodard, Edward Herrmann, Steve Allen, Jayne Meadows and Lainie Kazan.

There are video clips of St. Elsewhere out there if you look for them. You can watch the saga of Mrs. Hufnagel on this playlist as an example of how they made a great story out of a bit part.

I intend to keep more clips, stories, retrospectives and features coming, all to celebrate the many things I've enjoyed while taking in the world of St. Eligius. That's how I'll make my case.

Retcon Alert! Father McCabe Is Alive and Well and Living in Arizona

Just noticed a pretty glaring continuity error, probably the only big one in the series.

Alex Corey (Jeff Allin) tells version one: Father McCabe
died while posing for his portrait.

Recently, I was browsing the Wikipedia entry for the show King of the Hill when I came across the term "retcon", which I had never heard before, but which refers to a phenomenon with which I am familiar. "Retcon", a verb, is a portmanteau of the term "retroactive continuity", which refers to "the alteration of previously established facts in a fictional work."

St. Elsewhere pulled a pretty big retcon, and I'm glad they did. In the third season episode, "Give the Boy a Hand", we are introduced to one of my favorite recurring characters, local artist Alex Corey (Jeff Allin). Alex has been hired to paint a portrait of St. Eligius's Chief of Services, Dr. Daniel Auschlander (Norman Lloyd), to celebrate his long tenure as the hospital's head administrator. The portrait is to hang in the chapel alongside that of Father Joseph McCabe, who founded the hospital in 1934, according to this scene.

I watched St. Elsewhere's seasons in reverse order on the Prime cable channel back in the nineties, and until I saw this episode, I had wondered just how the hell this guy ended up painting Dr. Auschlander's portrait, judging by his three subsequent appearances. Alex Corey is a very serious artist. He resents the assignment, and he's not shy about sharing his feelings. His father painted the portrait of Father McCabe, so he was given the job. In between gripes, he tells Dr. Auschlander that his father was amazed at how perfectly still Father McCabe could sit. That is, until the elder Corey discovered that his subject had died.

This version of events stands until the following season, when the history of St. Eligius was explored in the multiple-Emmy-winning two-part episode, "Time Heals". It starts off with a flashback to the hospital's grand opening in 1935. We learn that Father McCabe, rather than dying in his chair as an old man posing for his portrait, departed the hospital in 1955, dismissed after the hospital was sold to the City by the Catholic diocese, and was re-assigned to Arizona. Edward Herrmann earned an Emmy nomination for his guest appearance as Father McCabe.

Father McCabe (Edward Herrmann) is still alive, though
not exactly kicking, one year later.

Father McCabe returns in the season five premiere, "Where There's Hope, There's Crosby", so there's no doubt that his presumed demise in season three has been re-written. He comes to St. Eligius from Arizona suffering from ALS and about to take up residence in a nursing home. He is paralyzed, depressed, and he wants to be euthanized until he is inspired to carry on by a heartwarming encounter with Dr. Westphall's autistic son, Tommy.

These days, I'm accustomed to having back episodes of my favorite TV series at my fingertips, so I have to think back to my younger days to remember how they used to broadcast network TV shows. A few new episodes, then a rerun or two, either from a previous season or the current one. They'd spread out the twenty-two episodes from September to May. You'd see the old episodes again, but few people had VCRs back then, so it wasn't like you were expected to go back and look up what happened.

So I'm thinking stuff like this wasn't as big a deal back then, unless you were an obsessive detail hound like me. I feel the poetic license was justified in this case. Edward Herrmann as Father McCabe is a great addition to the show's mythology. After "Time Heals", they changed the portrait of Father McCabe in the chapel to resemble Herrmann. It's clear that the "Time Heals" version is the preferred version of events.

Update, February 1, 2014: Spotted another one... In season two's "Vanity", the voice-over in the TV documentary on Dr. Craig mentions that St. Eligius became a public hospital in the late forties. That got re-written in "Time Heals" as well.

Drs. Westphall and Auschlander regard the original portrait
of Father McCabe in "Breathless".

Update, February 21, 2014: The Father McCabe story actually changed twice, I've discovered. Early in season three, in the fifth episode, "Breathless", Daniel is in the chapel communing with the portrait of Father McCabe (he feels remorse over his handling of the nurses' strike and discovering that longtime maintenance supervisor Rawly Moreland is suffering from asbestosis from working at St. Eligius) when Dr. Donald Westphall (Ed Flanders) enters.

Daniel asks Donald if he ever met the man, and Donald says 'no'. (In "Time Heals"--Father McCabe is a mentor to the troubled young Westphall.) Then he states that McCabe founded the hospital in 1932.

Ah, things were so much simpler before we had all this digitization!

Video: Victor's Wife Airs their Dirty Laundry on the P.A.

A funny clip from season two: Roberta's marital issues with Victor accidentally get broadcast on the hospital's P.A. system.

Victor's wife Roberta (Jean Bruce Scott) spills the beans
about her failing marriage to her friend, St. Eligius's operator.

There seems to be a market for St. Elsewhere clips on YouTube, so as I'm researching other pieces, I'll be watching out for scenes that work well as stand-alone video clips.

This scene is one of my favorite gags, from the season two episode "Attack". Dr. Victor Ehrlich (Ed Begley, Jr.) has rather impulsively married his new girlfriend, Roberta Sloan (Jean Bruce Scott), who is a patient of the hospital's psychiatrist, Dr. Weiss (Philip Sterling), and a candy striper in the hospital. After an absence of a few episodes, Victor and Roberta return to work, but without the glow of connubial bliss you'd expect from returning honeymooners.

Turns out Roberta has a list of grievances, but she's not sure if she can confide in her friend, St. Eligius's operator. The operator assures Roberta that she can be trusted, and that she wouldn't breathe a word of Roberta and Victor's marital problems to anyone.

A call interrupts their conversation, and when Roberta fetches a pen so the operator can take a message, she accidentally switches on the microphone of the hospital's public address system. Unbeknownst to them, the remainder of their conversation is broadcast throughout the hospital. The gossip has everyone in the hospital spellbound until Nurse Shirley Daniels (Ellen Bry) calls the operator to inform her of the mishap.

I've been watching this stretch of episodes, and if you remember, the two young lovebirds both have issues with commitment and relationships that they discuss with the hospital's psychiatrists, Dr. Weiss and Dr. Michael Ridley (Paul Sand). It seems really strange to me that two mental health professionals would recommend that two people who barely know each other should get married (Weiss himself facilitated the proposal). Of course, that makes for better TV, so I'll willingly suspend my disbelief here.

"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.

St. Elsewhere's Series Finale: The Legendary Snow Globe Ending

Video of St. Elsewhere's classic ending: the whole series was imagined by Tommy Westphall, Donald's autistic son.

Tommy Westphall (Chad Allen), the real creative force
behind St. Elsewhere.

It's been great to actually get some feedback from readers of this site! I can say that this post is here by popular demand (i.e. two requests).

This is the classic ending from the series finale, "The Last One", which originally aired May 25, 1988. I've posted the clip on YouTube. (May be blocked in some countries, particularly those that get Channel 4.)

Yes, they did the it-was-all-a-dream ending...sort of. During the finale, we get some emotional closure for most of the show's characters, including Dr. Wayne Fiscus (Howie Mandel), who has completed his residency, Dr. John Gideon (Ronny Cox), who has quit after a disastrous run as the CEO of St. Eligius, and Dr. Donald Westphall (Ed Flanders), who has returned to St. Eligius with his autistic son Tommy (Chad Allen) to reclaim his post as boss after spending most of season six in New Hampshire.

Donald is listening to opera music in the office of long-time colleague and opera buff Dr. Daniel Auschlander (Norman Lloyd), who had passed away earlier that day. (In "Time Heals", we see how they met. In 1945, an angry, teenaged Donald Westphall calls the hospital's new Jewish doctor a "kike," earning him a slap from Father McCabe.) Tommy is watching snow fall through the window.

Then we see an exterior shot of the hospital, and we get a new perspective. Tommy is sitting on the floor of an apartment, holding a snow globe in his hands. We learn that "Auschlander" is his grandfather, and his father, "Westphall", is a construction worker, whose crew just finished the twenty-second storey on a building. (This was the 22nd episode of the season.)

Turns out Tommy spends most of his time staring into the snow globe, which contains a miniature building inside that looks an awful lot like St. Eligius, and his father wonders what he sees in there all day. We viewers know the answer--he imagines his father and grandfather as the heads of the hospital in the snow globe, and he apparently dreamed up a fifty-two year history of the place.

I'll write more about the ending later, and another time, I'll share my thoughts on the implications of the "Tommy Westphall Universe", the intertextual phenomenon that logically follows from this scene's revelation. For now, enjoy the clip!

Watch "Time Heals" on YouTube

St. Elsewhere's greatest episode, a chronicle of the hospital on its fiftieth anniversary, is available on YouTube.

From 1965: Rookie nurse Helen Rosenthal (Christina
Pickles) meets young Luther Hawkins, whose mother
is working upstairs.

It's hard to dispute that St. Elsewhere has one episode that stands out as the series' single best offering. "Time Heals" parts one and two were the seventeenth and eighteenth episodes of season four, airing on back-to-back nights on February 19 and 20, 1986. The episode was St. Elsewhere's most decorated, winning four trophies at the 1986 Emmy Awards, for writing, art direction, sound mixing, and costuming.

The two-parter used flashbacks to tell the backstories of several characters, jumping back and forth by ten-year intervals. It's easy to see why they won Emmys for art direction and costuming--you can tell at a glance whether you're seeing St. Eligius in 1935, 1945, 1955, 1965, 1975 or 1985.

We get backstories for Dr. Donald Westphall (Ed Flanders), Dr. Mark Craig (William Daniels), Dr. Daniel Auschlander (Norman Lloyd), Nurse Helen Rosenthal (Christina Pickles), and the hospital's founder and administrator, Father Joseph McCabe (Edward Herrmann).

The episode features guest stars Kate Mulgrew, Brian Kerwin, William Russ and John Scott Clough as the O'Casey family. Terrence O'Casey (Kerwin) has been admitted with mysterious symptoms, and it's up to an injured Dr. Jack Morrison (David Morse), whose diagnostic skills leave much to be desired, to figure out what's wrong. Jack explores the O'Casey family history at St. Eligius to find the answer.

Thanks to YouTube user Janewayish for posting these as part of a tribute to Mulgrew, who played Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager.

There's a playlist with all twelve parts, or you can check out the embedded videos below.

"Time Heals" Part 1 of 12:

"Time Heals" Part 2 of 12:

"Time Heals" Part 3 of 12:

"Time Heals" Part 4 of 12:

"Time Heals" Part 5 of 12:

"Time Heals" Part 6 of 12:

"Time Heals" Part 7 of 12:

"Time Heals" Part 8 of 12:

"Time Heals" Part 9 of 12:

"Time Heals" Part 10 of 12:

"Time Heals" Part 11 of 12:

"Time Heals" Part 12 of 12: