John Falsey's work with Joshua Brand makes room for difficult people and humour that comes from getting to know them. We value that patience, though St. Elsewhere can explain its lessons long after they have landed.
Fi1m perspective
In St. Elsewhere (1982), doing important work does not excuse the hospital staff's shortcomings. The decaying Boston hospital gives flawed professionals a convincing place to work, without requiring them to become agreeable. We warmed to the series because it remained interested in people who could be difficult to like. That willingness to stay with them is what we value in John Falsey's writing. The actors make the time spent with these people worthwhile, even when the pace drags.
Falsey co-created the programme with John Masius, Mark Tinker and Joshua Brand; this is shared work, and any account of it needs to remember that. He had met Brand while working as story editor on The White Shadow (1979). Their work together moved from the hospital to the Seattle family of A Year in the Life (1986), then to the Alaskan setting of Northern Exposure (1990). The settings changed, but their interest remained in relationships, in people encountering those unlike themselves, and in humour that came from character rather than a supply of jokes.
Northern Exposure made that interest the basis of a fish-out-of-water comedy-drama with an eccentric ensemble. Our reservation is clearest in St. Elsewhere, where concern for the staff sometimes becomes an insistence on explaining what we should learn from them. Falsey and Masius were among its writers, and the scripts can continue pressing a moral point after it has registered. Some storylines also strain belief further than the carefully established hospital setting can accommodate. These are real weaknesses in a programme whose people otherwise reward sustained attention.
Falsey left the industry in 1993, with a later consulting credit on Providence (1999). We would have welcomed more of his attention to difficult working lives, provided the scripts trusted us to draw our own conclusions. Start with St. Elsewhere for the actors and the flawed staff, and allow for slow stretches and the occasional lecture.
Biography
John Falsey was an American television writer, producer and director. He graduated with a BA in English from Hampshire College in 1975 and earned an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. In 1979 he joined the production staff of the series The White Shadow, where he met Joshua Brand.
Falsey and Brand co-created the medical drama St. Elsewhere (1982–1988) and the series Northern Exposure (1990–1995). They also created I'll Fly Away and A Year in the Life, and Falsey wrote and produced episodes of Amazing Stories. He received eleven Emmy Award nominations and won three, along with a Humanitas Prize and other honours. Falsey left the industry in 1993, returning briefly as a consulting producer on Providence in 1999.
