Buffalo writer-producer Tom Fontana is working on his next drama project for Showtime, but he is just as excited about what’s happening to the first project that propelled his Emmy-winning career.
“St. Elsewhere,” the groundbreaking hospital series set in Boston that ran on NBC from 1982-88, became available on the streaming site Hulu last month.
Fontana’s TV writing job career began on that series when he was hired by the show’s producer, the late Bruce Paltrow.
“I’m very excited,” said Fontana in an interview Monday at an Elmwood Avenue restaurant near the home where he grew up. “It is great to have it back. It is like your first love, it is suddenly getting acknowledged again.
“It is sort of the same thing that is happening with ‘Oz’ (his HBO series) in that you do something and when you first do it, people say that’s kind of interesting and then when you look at it from a historical perspective and you go, ‘wow, look at that hospital show.’ That was unique. Because everything before it was ‘Dr. Kildare’ and ‘Marcus Welby.’ ”
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Fontana, who was home in Buffalo for the first time in three years to be interviewed for a program at a local church and meet with officials at his alma mater, SUNY Buffalo State, said he hasn’t watched a hospital show since “St. Elsewhere.”
That makes him very different from most Western New Yorkers since almost all hospital dramas on broadcast networks do well here.
But if you ask me, none have done it better than “St. Elsewhere.” The 1980s pace might be a little slow for today’s viewers, but the storylines remain as compelling as anything seen on “The Good Doctor,” “Chicago Med,” “The Resident” and “New Amsterdam.”
The doctors on “St. Elsewhere” weren’t as infallible as Kildare and Welby.
The cast came close to being infallible.
The actors included a young Mark Harmon before “NCIS,” Howie Mandel when he had hair before “America’s Got Talent” and Denzel Washington before he became a major movie star.
In addition, there was the husband-and-wife team of Williams Daniels and Bonnie Bartlett. Fontana recently had dinner with them.
“They are as delightful as always,” he said.
Three cast members have died -- Fontana’s wife, Sagan Lewis, Stephen Furst and Ed Flanders.
Another cast member, Norman Lloyd, is very much alive at age 104.
“He is as sharp as a tack, remembers everything and still has that twinkle of a 12-year-old boy in his eyes,” said Fontana.
Fontana has been pleased by the reaction since the show became available on Hulu.
“People are saying, ‘we’d forgotten how original the show was,’ ” said Fontana. “We were going places no sane writers would go.”
That included killing off characters played by Harmon, Terence Knox and David Birney.
“Everybody thinks killing characters started with ‘Game of Thrones,’ ” said Fontana. “We were doing it basically because that’s life. People die. Ironically, Norman Lloyd’s character, who had cancer, was supposed to die in the first six episodes. We just all fell in love with him, so we just kept writing for him.”
At age 67, Fontana keeps writing every day at 5 a.m. for “City On a Hill,” the Showtime series produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Fontana joined the project after the pilot was written.
He explained it is about the Boston Miracle, the first time in the city’s history that a coalition of African-American ministers, federal and local agencies and police officers attempted to figure out how to break gang violence and gun violence in the 1990s.
“What was remarkable about it, it succeeded,” said Fontana. “It was a huge success. Unfortunately, they stopped doing it and the city went back to what it does. Like everything I work on, it is a character piece but the underpinning of it is that these characters need to come together to make a better life for everybody.”
Kevin Bacon plays a corrupt FBI agent and Aldis Hodge plays a crusading assistant district attorney. There also is a Boston family who Fontana said “basically do heists.”
“We are seeing the world from several different perspectives and their wives and their families,” said Fontana.
The series will start filming in January and is expected to air on Showtime next summer.
Fontana said he was approached by Showtime programming president Gary Levine about becoming the showrunner of the drama while he was developing a different show for the pay-cable network.
“He believed I would be the right guiding spirit for it because it deals with gun violence, misogyny and racism and things that I have written about in the past,” said Fontana. “I watched the pilot and thought it was excellent. The writing was great, the cast was great. So I said yes.”
“It is the first time I have ever stepped into a show where they have shot a pilot before I got involved,” said Fontana.
His own Showtime project is a series he and his producing partner, Barry Levinson, have written based on the 1997 movie “Wag the Dog” that Levinson directed.
Like everything, it is harder and harder to put in all the work required as a showrunner as one ages. Fontana, who has won three Emmy awards and four Peabody awards and several other awards, isn’t sure he will continue in such a big role forever.
“I don’t know,” said Fontana. “I am certainly going to write forever. But the producing stuff does get harder on two levels. One on the fact the business has hardened. This is going to sound like grandpa: When I started television, NBC was owned by RCA but it was still a relatively small company. CBS was a small company. ABC was a small company.
“And now there is just this sort of monolith around every entity and there is a lot of pressure on the people. There was always pressure on the executives. But it feels worse now that they are really struggling to satisfy masters who have really no interest in television. They have the interest in the bottom line.”
This isn’t to say he won’t work on a broadcast network project, if asked.
“Sure, sure,” said Fontana before turning comical. “I have no prejudices. Anyone stupid enough to hire me. I’ll work for them.”
