St. Elsewhere

Best doctor or hospital show ever. Great cast, intelligent and challenging writing with characters you cared about. Brilliant show with a dark side that gave it great depth.

This was one of my favorite shows when it was out and I also enjoyed it in reruns but its never on anymore. A lot of its cast went on to bigger and better things. The predisessor to ER.

Only medical drama I actually liked.

A great show. Sad and funny at the same time and way ahead of its time...Can anybody remember the name of the actress who played the sex-starved pathologist? In one episode, she had sex in the hospital elavator!

I didn't get it.

This was truely a great show with great acting and writing. It was gritty and a bit more realistic than most of today's medical show. I never missed an episode.

This is an underappreciated show and I wish it were still on the air. This show pioneered a genre and tackled issues like breast cancer, AIDS, rape, drug use etc. Great cast and terrific guest stars. Maybe not as detailed on the medical-side of things as today's shows, but better in terms of the human interest factor.

a true classic. brilliant writing and acting and the ability to tickle your funny bone and pull at the strings of your heart, often within the same scene.

If I were making a list of the top 10 best shows of all time on television, this show would be on it. Excellent cast, superb writing. At times ahead of it's time, funny, edgy, moving and thought provking. The best medical drama ever made.

A fantastic show with the greatest series finale in history!

Like Newhart, St. Elsewhere is a show I've only seen on occasion, but I wish I could watch it more. It was the ER of the 1980's. Great acting, exciting plots, etc.

A great tv.drama about a hospital called st. Eligius. this show is from the 1980s. Good actors. well written show. It also had some good guest stars. I liked the one with Doris Roberts and James Coco as the homeless people. DEnzel Washington, Ed Flanders, William Daniels. Norman Lloyd were all good as some of the doctors. the people who made Hill Street Blues also made this show. I enjoy watching it on the Bravo station. Well done show. I like as much as ER.

This was my favorite show during the 80's. I think ER has taken medical dramas a step higher but I loved the characters! I also loved the series finale, where we learned that the entire show was inside the mind of an audtisic child dreaming from a scene in a snow globe.

It was a pretty fun show and the ending was a real shocker.

THE BEST DRAMA of the 80s!!!

Very entertaining show I watched as a kid in the 1980s, which probably is why I'm a big "ER" fan, though St. Elsewhere went a little more in depth with the drama and human interest aspect. A very talented cast was a blessing for the show, from stars-to-be Denzel Washington to comedien Howie Mandel and co-stars like Kathy Bates (she was the homeless lady with Tourette's syndrome who was constantly hooting, beating on a table and yelling out swear words) and Helen Hunt. The show did get a little over dramatic and plain weird sometimes, like when Dr. Wesphall mooned that other doctor and Dr. Aushlander turned into Superman in the episode where they were going to tear down the hospital. And then in the end we found out the whole thing took place in the imagination of Dr. Wesphall's autistic son who stared a snow globe all day long- weeeeooooooh! Still, a very entertaining and gripping drama.

I hate this show! I'd rather watch goats fly then watch this crap. It's never, ever belivable and the plots are so boring and overreacted.

Superb show. Much better than ER!

All other medical shows pale in comparison.

stupid show

I didn't watch this as religiously as I watched Hill Street Blues, but, boy, was this show good. Like HSB, it relied on a great ensemble cast and tremendous writing. It was also a show that wasn't afraid to tackle tough issues, giving one of its main characters AIDS, killing off a main character's wife, and showing the devastating impact on someone's psyche due to rape. On the other hand, this show was incredibly quirky even up to its final episode which ended with the realization that the whole show was the workings of the creative mind of Westphal's autistic child. That just don't make shows like this anymore.

This show literally set the standard for all of your medical shows that you see today on television (i.e. "ER", "Chicago Hope", "City of Angels", just to name a few). The cast and guest stars that came from "St. Elsewhere" have gone on to extraordinary film careers (i.e. Denzel Washington, Helen Hunt, Kathy Bates, David Morse, and Tim Robbins). It also broke alot of ground dealing with controversial issues and topics that are now common place in television. "St. Elsewhere" was ingenuis to use humor in its well crafted stories and situations. In retrospect,"St. Elsewhere" is a television masterpiece with an extremely talented cast of actors and superb writers that won the hearts of critics, peers, and the television audience for six seasons. The show won several Emmy awards for its acting and writing. "St. Elsewhere" deserves to be in the Top 10-20 list!!!