I generally only hear nothing but praise about how Newhart ended, and nothing but disdain about how St. Elsewhere ended. And I pretty much feel the same way, but…
Thinking about it, why is it bad that everything that happened in St. Elsewhere was just in the imagination of an autistic kid, but OK that everything that happened in Newhart was the dream of the character of Bob’s previous show?
Is it because one was a drama and one a comedy? Was it because in Elsewhere the kid was autistic? The end of both shows basically say that none of it ever happened, so why the love for one ending, and the hatred for the other?
Newhart was a comedy and it was funny. St. Elsewhere was (I have heard, I never watched it) a drama. It didn’t work on Dallas, a drama, where Bobby did not die that season he left, it was just a bad dream of his wife’s.
It was the fact that one was a comedy and one was a drama.
It was because the entire final episode of Newhart had veered into fantasyland, and the ending was a brilliant – if surreal – way to tie everything up.
It was because St. Elsewhere had shown dangerous signs of shark-jumping before, and the ending, which could have brought it back to a realistic conclusion, instead went the other way. (In other words, one was a comedy, one was a drama.)
And, to tell the truth, everybody loved Emily Hartley and nobody loved Tommy.
Leaving the comedy vs. drama aspect aside, While Bob could have had the silly dream about running an inn, there was no way in hell Tommy could have had a daydream about the complex social, legal and medical issues that made up St. Elsewhere. I don’t care if under the autism he was secretly the smartest kid on the face of the earth, he didn’t have the knowledge base needed to concoct such a complicated and lengthy fantasy.
I was a teenager when St. Elsewhere aired, and usually my father (a doctor of internal medicine & specialist in infectious diseases, who had a private practice & worked in a hospital for 25 years by the time it debuted) would often cringe or occasionally yell at the TV screen in exasperation. By his account, most of the medical jargon, procedures & issues discussed on the show were ludicrously off the mark, as if…well, as if the show were being written by an 8 year old autistic boy!
Anyway, FWIW, I recall the producers had actually considered ending the series by having a nuclear war take place! I prefer the “it was all Tommy’s dream!” ending.
I wrote a story in grade 3 in which I concocted an elaborate setup that seemed impossible to get out of, which ended with “…and then I woke up”. My grade 3 teacher suggested that it was a very lazy way of ending the story and that the skill lay in coming up with a reasonable solution within the story to end it. I took it to heart and realized that the writers of things like Dallas and St. Elsewhere (neither of which I watched) seemed to be taking the lazy way out.
With Dallas, the whole season was just thrown out. That’s a nice thank you to the viewing audience…‘Thanks for spending the last year with us, none of it amounts to anything…’.
I just read the Wikipedia entry for St. Elsewhere and it seems that they were trying to be clever, but looked to me like they spent their time trying to work other show references into it, rather than a clean end.
I watched Newharts shows and the difference, to me, was that they were mocking the ‘dream’ ending. The entire series was a dream, and the explanation of it that he gives to Emily was spot on. The fact that they went back to Newharts previous characters was priceless. We already had a relationship with them, had their bed as a common location and could easily see this being a scene from that show.
There’s a story that in one of the first-season episodes of Newhart, his wife (Mary Frann) enters the scene wearing a sexy nightgown and Dick Loudon calls the character Emily(the character’s name was Joanna.)
I just have to chime in here as someone who loves both the Newhart and St. Elsewhere endings and thinks that they each served the purpose for which they were intended. Newhart was a comedy, and having Bob end up back in bed with Suzanne Pleshette provided one of the biggest laughs ever. The fact that the entire series had been a dream was pretty much irrelevant, although it did set up the punchline.
St. Elsewhere on the other hand was one of those slightly bizarre dramas where everything seemed just a little bit “off”. Although it was gritty, it was never realistic. Episodes often invoked other T.V. shows and included fantasy elements. As a depiction of an inner-city hospital, it never really made sense. As the fantasy of an autistic child, it did. The fact that it had complex elements was part of the point – that we don’t really know what is going on in the mind of an autistic child, and that this one at least understood and thought about far more than anyone suspected. I know it didn’t work for everyone, but it worked for me, and made me appreciate the entire series a little bit more.
I remember St. Elsewhere going really oddball with their plotlines in their final season…I think they were purposefully going bizarre setting up the reveal at the end. I was too little to watch the early years, but I watched the final few seasons with my parents up until the end. Of course, they were always a little off-center…remember when Howie Mandel’s character went to Purgatory (I think)? Good times.
And funniest, considering she played straightman for Bob, who was everybody else’s straightman. This makes her a much prettier, and more self-aware*, Margaret Dumont to Bob’s Groucho.
ETA: And she was no slouch when it came to filling out her costumes.
Groucho once claimed, I think that it was in an interview with Dick Cavett, that Dumont was as clueless as she played. This is unfair and inaccurate, as can been seen the several times she’s stifling a laugh, either during her setup or after Groucho’s gag.
