Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/11/st-elsewhere-and-the-snow-glo.html
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I spent the better part of a snowy weekend programming my C64 to play that theme song.
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This video contains content from Channel 4, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.
The UK Channel 4?
I’m in the UK!
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I didn’t watch the show on its initial run on commercial TV but my wife and I got hooked when a local PBS station rebroadcast it, one episode every evening on weekdays. So we got it, relatively rapid fire. I still remember the “oof!” when I realized the implication of what I was watching in this episode, like being punched in the chest. I later read some work of short fiction (I can’t remember the name) where a man and wife discover they are trapped in (or only exist in) the mind of a disabled person. I think it may have been in Omni magazine? Does this ring a bell with anyone?
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Stargate? 
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The massive fatal flaw in the reasoning behind the “Tommy Westphall Universe theory” is that no cross-overs that happen in a fantasy or dream sequence are actually canonical.
Even if Tommy imagined the entire “Elsewhere-verse” he might very well have populated it with characters that he, himself, had seen on TV.
I mean, I fantasize about the fourth Doctor all the time, but that doesn’t mean I created Leela. Or that the show ceases to exist if I don’t think about it.
So if characters from Homicide appear in Tommy’s fantasy, it does not follow that Tommy also created Homicide. Quite the contrary, if we want to be consistent about it; it turns all of St Elsewhere into one long Homicide fan fiction…
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Current Master List of all 419 Tommy Westphall Multiverse shows.
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Any more off-topic posts will result in complaints that I have banned folks for unreasonable amounts of time.
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Also, even if we allow that direct crossovers, and chains thereof, take place in Tommy’s mind, indirect crossovers should still be considered separate. Do you know what’s even more believable than the idea that Tommy populates his fan-fictions with characters from TV? The idea that he populates them with brands from real life.
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Well, what Westphall did was allow Mark Harmon to comes to terms with his HIV status and start a new life in the Security Services.
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So weird. I have almost no knowledge of this show. It started in '82. I was in college, The only TVs were in the common areas and the only shows I remember seeing around that time were Cheers and The Day After.
Denzel Washington was in a TV show???
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Mr. Shoop’s inappropriate relationship with his students during summer school should have preempted his career in naval crime scene investigation.
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Gawd, I loved St. Elsewhere.
The writers were particularly good at playing the loooong game. One episode – set on Christmas – had Dr. Westphall exclaiming “But Tommy doesn’t know what day it is. He doesn’t know who Jesus was, or what praying is.”
The single longest setup for a gag that I remember was the introduction of a pair of Candy Stripers; twins (I believe) known as the Crane sisters. They never had any lines; they just kind of passed in and out of scenes around the periphery.
I don’t remember how long they waited – it may have been a couple seasons – before Dr. Fiscus finally said:
“You Crane girls really knock me out.”
Give it a minute… (they leave the West behind.) I remember sitting there, just shaking my head in amazement and respect that the writers had given a couple years’ employment to these two actresses for the sake of a single well-delivered pun.
It’s right up there with the national hero who introduced Beaver Cleaver to ’50s America.
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As were George Clooney, Helen Hunt, and a host of others – including my personal favorite, Norman Lloyd, who was one of Orson Welles’s original Mercury Theater players.
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I’m sad I never got to see the final couple of series of St Elsewhere, that final scene would surely have been mind-blowing. But I gave up after the plotline where the mortician was raped. That changed the tone of the whole show for me.
Not unlike Community setting up their “Beetlejuice” joke over the course of three seasons.
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I believe it’s called “All 4” these days. I believe it’s still just as shit.
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It is. I put up with it in order to watch Foreign Things on Walter Presents, but ye gods, it is awful.
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And it turns out that doctors with substance abuse problems can go really really wrong, especially if you get them wet.
