Hacker Cinema
St. Elsewhere
1982 · TV series · 60 min episodes · 6 seasons
Created by Joshua Brand, John Falsey, John Masius, Mark Tinker
St. Elsewhere is an American medical drama television series that originally ran on NBC from October 26, 1982 to May 25, 1988. The series starred Ed Flanders, Norman Lloyd and William Daniels as teaching doctors at a lightly-regarded Boston hospital who gave interns a promising future in making critical medical and life decisions.
2 positive3 neutralfrom 5 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
5 comments on Hacker News
It wasn't. 80s TV shows and movies were overwhelmingly recorded on film. Primarily because it was much easier to edit film than tape.
And we are streaming a ton of them now that they've gone back and scanned the original film in 4K.
It's awesome. Heck you can watch I Love Lucy from 1951 in glorious high definition, sharper than anyone ever viewed it originally. It's basically magic.
If you want 1980's, go watch St. Elsewhere or Cheers. They have cinema detail now instead of the fuzzy TV detail you would have seen in the 80's.
I never said white house directive, but I said he used his social and political power to effectively ban it from, well, really being talked about in the spotlight. There's truly plenty of articles on the subject, or you can ask anyone in Los Angeles who worked in the industry about the concerted effort of Hollywood executives to avoid that word at the behest of Reagan's administration.
Also, your examples are not particularly illustrative. Reagan did not even publicly mention AIDs until 1985 (though reporters had been asking him about it since 1982), when it first started to become worrisome to straight people (and still created no presidential task force or dedicated funding until 1987). Golden Girls mentioned it after that. So did Trapper John, MD. St. Elsewhere was notable precisely because it was one of the only primetime shows that did when it was exclusively thought of as a "gay disease".
To truly understand how insidious Reagan's administration was, when doctors were ringing the alarm bells in press conferences years prior (and the next, and the next, and the next...) Reagan's response was to ask any reporter if they were gay to a crowd of laughter and move on. In fact, Nancy Reagan even arguably personally condemned movie star Rock Hudson, who was a personal friend of theirs, to an earlier death by explicitly refusing his appeal to have him admitted into a retroviral trial in France because they did want to be associated with the gay community in any way.
https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/03/nancy-reagan-refused-help-dying-rock-hudson-get-aids-treatment
It's really not too big of a jump to make the connection between a man who basically started the "moral majority" movement and created virtually all modern film and tv regulation to this day (aside from the MPAA, he also repealed the FCC Fairness Doctrine, which basically is what gave rise to the giant split in media today, and really all major legislation around what can/cannot be shown on TV/in theaters that still persists to this day), would actively use his power to discourage AIDs from being talked about in media, just as he did Communism, anything non-nuclear family, and really anything that fell outside his bubble of conservative values.
This was the man who effectively started the war on Hollywood. He came from Hollywood. He knew the studio execs, the donors, the investors (they funded him!), it wouldn't take much for them to listen to him.
This sounds a little crazy. AIDS was definitely discussed in TV in the 80s. First of all on the news all the time, but in prime time dramas and sitcom as well. CNN documents several examples.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/01/entertainment/80s-hollywood-aids-crisis
St Elsewhere might have been the first in 1983. Golden Girls, Trapper John MD. There was plenty of hesitancy to deal with a difficult subject, and the gay element compounded the difficulty (openly gay characters were not common). But to suggest it was at the direction of the Federal Govt is totally absurd. Reagan was as disliked and mocked almost as much as Trump was.
Most "tech" shows or hacker scenes are akin to the police procedurals, courtroom dramas, and medical shows that generally don't bear much relationship with what it's like day-to-day for cops, lawyers, or hospital workers. (Hence shows/films like The Wire and Reno 911, My Cousin Vinny and Suits, St. Elsewhere and Scrubs stand out.)
As a founder of a venture-backed startup with first-to-market tech that went through an accelerator in Palo Alto in the 2010s, Silicon Valley is basically entirely accurate. Actually tamer and more restrained than reality in many regards, at least anecdotally.
"St. Elsewhere is the Kevin Bacon of TV shows" [1]
[1] http://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/19892/what-is-the-biggest-crossover-universe-in-tv