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The Greatest TV Finale Ever That No One But Me Loved
It was the ending of one of my all time favourite TV shows, NBC's St. Elsewhere, a 1980s hospital drama with a twist. Unlike other medical shows before or since, the dialogue in each episode was full of "Easter eggs" - puns, jokes and even allusions to other television programs of the past and present.
If you watched it with that in mind, each episode was a relevation.
And then came the ending. It's described in the article at the link below and although much of the public and many TV critics came down on it as the worst thing ever, I totally loved it and remember it to this day.
True, it was no Mary Tyler Moore Show or Newhart, whose endings were both the stuff of legend. But it kept in the whimsical bizareness of a show that never really did great in the ratings but network brass liked so much, they just kept renewing it. And after six seasons of strangeness never before seen on network TV, it ended with a bang or a whimper - depending on your point of view.
How Did ‘St. Elsewhere’ End? A Look at One Of Television’s Most Infamous Finales
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Re: The Greatest TV Finale Ever That No One But Me Loved
A great medical series in its day. Miss that show (found it on CHCH not long ago) and FOX's "House"... "Grey's Anatomy" is too sappy for my liking.
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Re: The Greatest TV Finale Ever That No One But Me Loved
There were a lot of moments that stood out to me, including a very brief shot of an orderly carrying a mattress out of a hospital room just as Dr. Donald Westphal was passing by. Someone yelled out "Donald Duck!" and he did. But the homage to Disney was unmistakable.
But my all time favourite moment is one I still find hard to believe they allowed on network TV in 1988. Dr. Mark Craig, played by the great William Daniels, was supposed to be dictating his memoirs into a cassette recorder. But no matter how hard he tried to keep it on the straight and narrow, it kept slipping into a pornographic romance novel.
At one point, just before someone knocks on the door, he said this:
"She came in from the garden carrying two kinds of flowers. I was playing the Wurlitzer.
She said, "where do you want these?
I said, "Put your roses on the table and your tulips on my organ."
I remember sitting there thinking, did I just really hear that on NBC? But yes, I did and I went bananas. It could only have happened on St. Elsewhere.
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