Elsewhere” (because it’s everyone’s second choice), is a bit of a joke. Eligius, referred to disparagingly by the press as “St. (Sample dialogue: one doctor to another in the morgue: “Can you give me a hand?” “Sure.” “It’s in the bag.”) Right from the pilot episode, which features an impromptu tryst in the hospital morgue, the show placed absurdist situations and off-center dialogue in the midst of trauma and distress. Kelley by introducing quirky humor into the previously no-laughs zone of hour-long drama. Elsewhere made possible the career of David E. Although primitive compared to the swirling cinematography of ER, the long takes are still impressively choreographed and acted, and helped give TV a visual life it had never had before. Frequently, the camera will track from one group of actors to another in a single shot, binding several disparate storylines into a larger context. Elsewhere also shook up the visual language of the TV drama, using long tracking shots and jittery hand-held camera work (now a TV cliché) to lend a sense of immediacy and continuity to the action. In addition to modernizing narrative structure, St. Eligius itself, a rundown, under-funded teaching hospital in South Boston. Cast members came and went over the course of its run, but the focus was always on St. Elsewhere helped popularize the TV trend of making a community - frequently a workplace - the main character. It featured an expansive, ensemble cast (12 actors are billed in the opening credits of the first season, along with many recurring guest stars), multiple plotlines in each episode, and ongoing story arcs that frequently involved cliffhangers and the phrase “Previously on…” Rather than focusing on a central character, St. Elsewhere was the second show (after Hill Street Blues, which NBC debuted the prior year) to bring soap opera techniques to bear on “serious” drama. Breaking with the monochromatic, one-protagonist / one-story formula of Ben Casey and Marcus Welby, M.D., St. Elsewhere, which invented the modern TV medical drama. Before the indie rock-drenched epiphanies of Grey’s Anatomy, before the adrenalized, crisis-a-minute pace of ER, there was St.
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