Lost Finale

So, the finale of the TV series Lost aired last night, and already what it all means is being hotly debated on the interweb.

I wasn't a fan, and was watching basketball and then Saving Grace, another show that is about to be cancelled, and a real shame, because it is absolutely brilliant, with the worst bad-girl cop ever. Holly Hunter, playing way against type.

Lost was woo-woo all the way through, but the ending, as I understand it from just hearing about it via reviews and the web, doesn't seem to be a patch on the ending of a TV show of which I was a big fan, back in the early-to-mid eighties, St. Elsewhere.

This was a medical show, about a second-rate teaching hospital in Boston, St. Eligius, and among other things, a springboard for the acting careers of several well-known stars in TV and movies, including Helen Hunt, Alfre Wooddard Howie Mandel, Mark Harmon, Ed Begley, Jr., and Denzel Washington. Well-written, well-acted, a great soap opera dramady I used to love. No other medical show ever came close, save ER, and that only in the first couple of years.

St. Elsewhere was sometimes referred to as Hill Street Blues in a hospital, another great ensemble show of the period, and won like thirteen Emmys. There were a lot of story lines, many of them continuing, and they sometimes killed off characters, and always kept you guessing.

The series lasted for six years, and the final episode of St. Elsewhere went into one of the hoariest, shaggiest, worst science fiction and fantasy cliches of all, stopping to offer homage to all kinds of major TV shows along the way. There was a doctor hunting for a mysterious one-armed patient, ala The Fugitive; the group hug from the Mary Tyler Moore Show; references to M*A*S*H and The Andy Griffith Show -- Henry Blake and Floyd the Barber; and a fat lady who sang; along with a nod to the Who's Tommy.

In the final scene, the camera pulls back from a view of a snow globe in the hands of an autistic boy, and when you see his father and grandfather, you realize ...

... it was all a dream ...

(Bob Newhart did that at the end of his second series, in which he played the owner of a New England inn. This was a killer-hilarious scene that made the entire series naught but a dream by Bob the psychologist in his first show, but that one was really funny. The St. Elsewhere finale made me want to scream and hunt down the writer and producer to slap them and call them many bad words ...)