Guest stars Piper Laurie and Alan Arkin at left appeared in the first three episodes this season. Kim Miyori, right, is a regular member of the cast.- Color of photo of Piper Laurie being lifted into a hospital bed.

It is not a good view for a man in need of an artistic vision, the view from the fourth floor of New York's Rockefeller Center, where Brandon Tartifoff presides over NBC's entertainment programming. You do not see much of life from the fourth floor. What you see are skyscrapers, corporate skyscrapers- Exxon, McGraw-Hill, Time-Life- monuments to soaring schemes and billion-dollar ledgers, reminders that the business of America is, after all, business, and that the business of television is, more particularly, ratings and advertising revenue. For despite all its talk about innovative quality, television remains a medium largely committed to numbers. So, in the early spring of 1983, when Brandon Tartikoff and his associates received reports that the numbers for their new medical drama, St. Elsewhere, had not climbed, their reaction was swift, the show had to be canceled.
Few could foresee then that the show could be resurrected. No one could forseee that it would return with two new leading characters, professional adversaries by day and lovers by night, whose romance bore an uneasy resemblance to that of Joyce Davenport and Frank Furillo on Hill Street Blues. Few knew of NBC's arm-twisting behind the scenes, or the producers' concessions to ideas that injected a soap-opera quality into the show's romantic entanglements. 'We aren't going to go too far,' producer-writer John Masius would say later. "This isn't going to be Trapper John.'
But Trapper John, M.D. was what audiences loved, and you could see a little of Trapper in St. Elsewhere now. Trapper-John had the right numbers, the right elements, all of which the producers of St. Elsewhere had steadfastly ignored the year before, when NBC emissaries had tersely relayed news of the show's probable cancellation to them at MTM Productions in Los Angeles. The producers had accepted the decision calmly.
It was as if they had been expecting the termination for some time and later when they spoke to each other of vacations and prospects for new shows, no one shed tears, no one mourned bitterly aobut the network's failure to promote the show. The cast reacted amicably as well. Ed Begley Jr., who had been nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Dr. Victor Ehrlich, said c'est la vie about the cancellation, though something told him the issue was not yet closed. "Just a feeling," he said. "Nothing justifies it. The show wasn't doing very good. We were dead."
They had been given their chance and, by the standards of commercial television, they had failed-miserably. Twice that season, St. Elsewhere had been the lowest-rated show in prime-time, and thought the numbers had improved somewhat, the show rarely found itself any higher than 30th among the opposition. No one had panicked immediately. Hill Street Blues, another MTM production, had zoomed after early ratings problems, and everyone agreed that St. Elsewhere, like Hill Street, had strong characters and a compelling storyline. The bizarre happenings inside the battered Boston teaching hospital called St. Elgius had an appropriate mix of the real and surreal paternalistic administrations, dashing doctors and a pathologist who liked conducting her love affairs in the morgue.
Everyone waited awhile for the ratings to climb, and when they didn't, suddenly everyone said there were problems: the show had no identifiable star; it needed a stronger leading man; whatever else, it absolutely required an injection of heavy romantic entanglements NBC officials blamed the show's scripts, insisting that the writers had bogged down the show with too many subplots and peripheral characters. So changes were made; subplots reduced, more identifiable characters given longer scenes so that viewers could learn their faces. Even after favorable reviews from critics, the show's numbers went nowhere.
No questions remained now. The show had to be jettisoned, and so it was, informally, NBC telling the St. Elsewhere staff not to expect a renewal of the program. Then, in the middle of May, a call came to Mark Tinker, now St. Elsewhere's supervisiing producer, from a network executive. NBC had decided to renew, said the executive. A meeting was hurriedly arranged. The next day, everyone gathered in a Los Angeles conference room to hear NBC chairman Grant Tinker, Mark's father, say that yes, indeed, the show would be coming back, noting that two of the last episodes had made an impressive jump in the ratings. The logic of the network's decision, even if it was benefiiting them, struck the makers of St. Elsewhere as dubious. "Yeah, but why are you renewing us?" executive producer Bruce Paltrow (Gwyneth's father) kept asking, dumbfounded.
It was the question nearly everyone connected with St. Elsewhere asked. "If someone finds the answer," said producer Masius, "he'll have unraveled this studio's biggest mystery." Conflicting rumors ran rampant. Grant Tinker had decided to renew because he wanted son Mark to have a show; MTM Productions had refused to sell NBC its promising new series Bay City Blues, unless the network renewed St. Elsewhere. Grant Tinker had forced the decision down Brandon Tartikoff's throat; no, Grant Tinker had not even been consulted. Tinker and Tartikoff were great friends. Some people questioned Tartikoff's decision to schedule the show against ABC's Hotel, which industry insiders had already tabbed as the new season's next blockbuster. "We think we can compete." said Tartikoff. "It's presumptious to say that we can't compete against a show that has never been on TV." Was Tartikoff simply being devious? some wondered.
No one knew anything for certain. "The network is trying to juice the show up." said Begley, part of St. Elswhere's large ensemble. "Look around. You'll see what I mean."

He glanced toward the set, where, at that moment, guest star Alan Arkin was waiting to do another scene. Arkin would be starring in the first three episodes, and eyeryone on the set agreed that his name alone would boost the show's ratings. "His value cannot be measured," said Paltrow happily. So pleased were the producers that they had acceded to all of Arkin's agent, including a stipulation that Arkin's scenes would be shot within a one-week period so that he could return home as quickly as possible. Now it was the fifth day of shooting, and Arkin paced uneasily, flicking at his hair, glancing at his watch, growing more restless by the moment. He lit a cigarette. "A couple more and I'm home free." he mumbled to Begley, by which he meant in two days, he would be heading back to New York, and peace. He did not like Los Angeles. "It's too groovy for me," he said one afternoon while devouring raw fish at a Los Angeles sushi bar. "Too groovy, know what I mean?" he asked.
Back on the set, he sared at the floor, mumbled a few lines to himself and announced himself ready. Adoring members of the cast watched from behind the cameras with undisguised awe. Arkin suddenly stopped. "Can we do it again?" he demanded of Mark Tinker, who was directing that day. In his look, there was something of the hired gun to Arkin. He was the big star who had been brought west to boost a beleagured show. The producers had paid him a lot of money. He had blown into Los Angeles a week before, would be blowing out again in a couple das, but in the meantime he had his reputation to consider, he wanted this done right. He spoke in low tones to Tinker. Tinker nodded. They shot it again, and from the side Begley smiled appreciatively.

Throughout the week, Arkin's presence diverted attentionaway from the other cast members, most of whom kept low profiles, staying off to the side, each engaged in his own activity. Terence Know, who plays the handsome Dr. Peter White, sat in a chair talking with friends, sometimes repeating a rather lurid Ted Kennedy joke. He is a singularly bizarre, funny man, not at all the pained, troubled character he portrays in the series. A few feet away, David Morse, one of the show's bright talents, was not talking with anyone. Painfully shy, he stood alone around the lights and cables, waiting for his scene.
William Daniels, who portrays the brilliant but demanding heart surgeon Mark Craig, appeared. So did fellow Emmy nominee Ed Flanders, who plays St. Elswhere's father figure, Dr. Donald Westphall. One face was missing: David Birney's. David Birney, explained the producers, would not be doing any scenes. He had taken a part in "Amadeus" on Broadway, after failing to get a pledge from the producers that his character, the dashing Ben Samuels, would be strengthened with bigger scenes. "We're not going to lose anything." said a production staff member about Birney's departure. "His character wasn't what we wanted anyway. It was hard for people, especially women, to identify with someone who had slept with everyone in the hospital. We wanted more of a romantic figure with qualities people could relate to."
This season, at the urging- some say insistence- of NBC, the producers injected new characters and romance into the show. The show has changed, evolving from what the NBC publicity releases used to call "a realistic and sometimes darkly humorous medical drama" to something a little more titallating, even mawkish, in the genre of a soap opera with scalpels. The impetus for the changes has come largely from NBC, which has not always pleased the show's producers. "I hope we get higher in the ratings so that people will leave us alone." said John Masius. "There are certain concessions we are willing to try without whoring ourselves out...but we're never going to do Trapper John or Marcus Welby, and people have to understand that. The whole idea of the show works against that...That's why it's kind of suspect that we were renewed.
Only Brandon Tartikoff in New York knew the anser to that mystery. "Temporary insanity," he sometimes said. He would laugh then and launch into a speech that had become something of the official NBc spiel for the show: St. Elsewhere had shown slow but steady progress in the ratings, the show had been nominated for an Emmy; the show's numbers mirrored those of Hill Street Blues at a comparable period. He mentioned everything before casually saying the one word that mattered most. Comp. The show had good comp. Which meant that St. Elsewhere had a good audience composition; it attracted a large number of viewers from TV's prime advertising audience, those between the ages of 18 and 49 with sizable incomes and an instinct for buying. "You know, the kinds of people who buy cleansers and all that crap," said Begley. The show had a much higher comp than other programs with significantly higher ratings, and that, in the end, had saved it; that, and the realization of NBC executives that they had no pilot that could do better than their struggling medical drama. "Thank God for people who like cleansers," concluded Begley.
"The surveys keep getting more sophisticated," Brandon Tartikoff said proudly from his Rockefeller Center office. An interesting thing, this comp. Tartikoff and other television executives had long waited for a device like it, something that could sift out the viewers with spending money from the multitudes without any. The implications were interesting, maybe ominous. Smaller audiences could shape programming, yet only if the smaller audience had big money. An anemic rating could suffice, yet only if a show's viewers could afford the cleansers and cars. Perhaps in the end that will be St. Elsewhere's legacy: that a show with no major stars, bedeviled by script problems and wracked by mediocre ratings, managed to survive because of the shape of its audience. It is programming by a new kind of numbers. "St. Elsewhere has a promisiing look to it." Brandon Tartikoff says these days. END

The article is also accompanied by a color photo - Nancy Stafford and Mark Harmon have been added to the cast this year.