Closing the Curtain on ‘St. Elsewhere’ Operation

“St. Elsewhere” was an aberration. It was certainly something no other network would put up with. And I don’t think that set of circumstances will ever happen again.

--Tom Fontana, former producer, “St. Elsewhere”

Ed Begley Jr., “St. Elsewhere’s” bumbling Dr. Victor Erlich, offered the final diagnosis of his medical career. “I think there was a period when last rites were being performed when we could have rallied,” he said, his tone clinically matter-of-fact. “But I think now we’ve got the toe tag on, and we’re in the drawer, and it’s sealed and locked.”

“St. Elsewhere,” NBC’s darkly comic series about a financially strapped Boston hospital and its beleaguered staff, is dead. Canceled. Toe-tagged. Sealed and locked. As Begley added wistfully, “It’s never over till it’s over--but I think in this case, it’s over .”

And the fat lady sings tonight: The last episode of “St. Elsewhere” airs at 10 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39.

“The strange thing that occurs to me when thinking about the show was how temporary it seemed,” mused Begley, who spent the last six years matching wits--and losing--with William Daniels, who played St. Eligius Hospital’s cranky chief of surgery, Mark Craig. “Through six years, I never put anything in my dressing room. The last year, I put in a rug and a lamp.

“Six years . . . I could have put in a sauna and a Jacuzzi, you know?”

NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff is fond of defining quality television as something “that starts with low ratings and ends with a cat meowing”--a reference to programs produced by MTM Enterprises, which end with a kitten logo in a sly takeoff on MGM’s roaring lion.

And none of MTM’s shows better defined quality television than “St. Elsewhere,” which established a defiant tradition of baiting the NBC censors, blurring the line between the real and the surreal, tantalizing the alert viewers with inside jokes and subtle references to literature, television and pop music lyrics, going precariously far out on a limb and then deliberately chopping it off.

“I saw it as a show about people struggling to answer life’s ridiculous questions--sometimes they would do it in a comic way, sometimes they would do it in a serious way,” said Tom Fontana, one of the show’s core group of writers and producers, who served as a creative consultant this season. “We never answered any of the questions we posed. We always said: ‘That’s a tough question--well, good night!’ ”

Despite its high standing among TV critics, “St. Elsewhere”--a derisive nickname for the aging South Boston medical facility--was never healthy in the ratings. But the series managed to survive for six years on a powerful drug called demographics: The show attracted a relatively small but highly desirable audience of young, affluent viewers, and that in turn attracted plenty of advertising dollars to NBC.

Not enough dollars, however, to keep the series alive for another year. Like St. Eligius itself, “St. Elsewhere” has fallen victim to economic pressures. Executive producer Bruce Paltrow explained that the show cost MTM more to produce than what NBC paid to broadcast it--which is common--but that because the outlook for recouping those deficits through syndicated reruns is so bleak, the company didn’t consider another year of expenditures worth its while.

“Hour shows are just not selling into syndication; the market is saturated with them,” Paltrow said in a telephone conversation from New York, where he and others from the “St. Elsewhere” production team are at work on “Tattinger’s,” a new NBC series from MTM slated for “St. Elsewhere’s” Wednesday night time slot in the fall. “And because we were never a hit, we didn’t have the firepower behind us to make the syndication business.”

Paltrow said he bears no grudge against the network or MTM for terminating “St. Elsewhere.”

“It was as far as they could go,” he said. “If NBC had started paying us more money, they would have had to start giving a lot of other people more money, too. There are no villains in this piece. It was not right for us to say, ‘You should lose more money.’ ”

Christina Pickles, whose character of Nurse Helen Rosenthal ended the series triumphantly by kicking a drug dependency, is the only one who believes that “St. Elsewhere” came to an end for creative as well as financial reasons.

“I think the final year’s story line reflected it,” she said, referring to the takeover and makeover of St. Eligius by a wealthy corporation at the outset of the final season. “It was this wonderful, crumbly, noble, decadent building that housed this incredible heart. The streamlining kind of took away its energy.”

Though they remain philosophical about the loss of “St. Elsewhere,” Paltrow, Fontana and the several cast members interviewed all said they would have been willing to continue indefinitely. Like their small but loyal band of viewers--who have already written at least 300 letters to MTM and the network protesting its cancellation--the “St. Elsewhere” team enjoyed life on the series even when times were tough, which was always.

“The show had, above all, an attitude,” said Norman Lloyd, whose character, liver specialist Dr. Auschlander, faced his own debilitating liver cancer during the run of the show. “The attitude was, ‘Nothing can get us down, as bad as it is.’ And it was bad all the time.”

Paltrow noted that the show’s bleak vision was deliberate. “It wasn’t darker than reality,” he said. “I think the reality of a hospital is much worse. I think reality is much more the smell of the hospital, the smell of death. That kind of anguish you just can’t transmit.

“The kind of gallows humor that was in the show was a case of art imitating life,” Paltrow continued. “The thing I’m proudest of is the overall balance of the comedy to the drama; the counterpoint of that really grew and grew.”

The stories speak for themselves. Howie Mandel’s Dr. Wayne Fiscus--who distinguished himself by having sex on an autopsy table during the show’s first episode--experienced death through a fantasy sequence last season. In another episode, St. Eligius traveled 50 years into the past. In another, Dr. Morrison, played by David Morse, lost his wife in a freak household accident, then listened with a mixture of anguish and reverence to her heart beating after being transplanted into someone else’s chest.

And Ed Flanders, who portrayed Dr. Donald Westphall, made his last appearance before leaving the regular cast early this season (he returns in the final episode) by mooning the camera.

Among Lloyd’s favorite sequences was one in which a stoned Dr. Auschlander, treating the side effects of chemotherapy with marijuana, stumbled into a 7-Eleven store with a case of midnight munchies.

Lloyd also enjoyed the priest who heard confession in a toilet stall (“I mean, that was wild--I never thought that would get on”), a nude surgery sequence based on Scandinavian medical practices and a scene in which Auschlander discussed sexual awakening with a frightened boy.

Though MTM hasn’t had much luck yet syndicating “St. Elsewhere,” Paltrow said he remains hopeful that the reruns will find a home someday, on cable if not on broadcast stations.

Lloyd, whose Dr. Auschlander was supposed to die years ago but enjoyed a miraculous remission, is even more hopeful.

“I think it’ll have another life,” he said, smiling enigmatically. “I think it can happen. And people say, ‘Norman, you’re either mad or senile or both’--but you don’t get a show like ‘St. Elsewhere’ very often in your life. There is too much that is rich, that is still to be mined.”