“AIDS And Comfort”
The 1983 TV Episode that Made History
When St. Elsewhere ended its six-season run on NBC in 1988, the medical drama’s finale suggested that the entire series had taken place inside the mind of an autistic child.
Fans and critics were divided over the fantasy farewell. But it was rich in irony: From the start, St. Elsewhere, about the staff and patients at Boston’s seen-better-days St. Eligius Hospital (derisively nicknamed St. Elsewhere) had established itself as the most realistic of doctor dramas, moving the genre from its early days of Marcus Welby physician heroics to stories about fallible professionals tackling the realities of modern medicine.
Nowhere was this more evident than in a bold episode that aired 40 years ago this month, titled “AIDS and Comfort,” which marked the first time that AIDS, the most feared and least understood new reality facing medicine at the time, was the focus of a scripted TV show.
The second-season episode centered on a rising-star Boston politician (guest star Michael Brandon) who checks in to St. Eligius with a range of virus-like complaints that turns out to be AIDS. (“HIV” and its related terminology were not yet part of the disease’s everyday vocabulary.) The diagnosis perplexes hospital staffers, given that the married-with-family 40-something man doesn’t fit the homosexual profile then primarily associated with AIDS. But eventually the patient, deep in the closet, confesses to a history of sexual encounters with men.
Panic and anxiety then grip St. Eligius. Meal trays are left outside of rather than walked into the man’s Isolation Ward room; vials of his blood are handled as if plutonium; the attending doctor’s wife begs him to drop the patient. Debates about transmission and ethics follow.
“It’s no surprise that AIDS first appeared on prime-time television in a hospital drama,” writes Manuel Betancourt in Vulture in 2021. “The genre, then being revolutionized by St. Elsewhere, was tailor-made to deal with storylines about the misconceptions about HIV and AIDS.”
If Steve Lawson’s broad-strokes script for the episode ventures into prime-time melodrama —it all plays out against the backdrop of a hospital blood-drive, internal rumor-mongering leads to a red-paint-graffitied AIDS scrawled on the hospital’s elevator doors — it seems in service of addressing what was then the world’s biggest medical mystery within the limited hour-long TV-series framework.
And as odd as it is in 2023 to hear a hospital administrator’s reaction to having an AIDS case in-house (“Well, this is going to kill us at City Hall; if the public finds out, forget about it”) or a chief physician’s perplexed reaction to how the then-still-presumed straight man acquired the virus (“Either [he] defies all the categories, in which case CDC should get involved, or …”) or to hear gay men referred to throughout only as homosexuals, the dialogue is just reflective of a less-enlightened era.
Still, “AIDS and Comfort” does include reasoned discussions about what were the medical facts connected to AIDS at the time. In the process, it introduced a taboo subject to mainstream television that in turn helped to lessen its stigma. No small feat in 1983.
“It set a standard for sensitivity and intelligence often lacking in prime time’s subsequent takes,” writes Bob Ickes in a 2007 poz.com appreciation.
As the episode closes, the politician leaves St. Eligius under the scope of growing press scrutiny — the news is leaked by staffers — after which he makes his condition public and opts to leave politics to focus on his now-fewer remaining days. (“The vast majority of AIDS patients die within two years,” he’s told.)
An Emmy-magnet throughout its run (62 nominations, 13 wins), St. Elsewhere continued to break television ground as it ran its four more seasons. Future storylines of the Bruce Paltrow-run show included doctor-burnout suicide, male rape, testicular cancer, and, in another AIDS first three years after “AIDS and Comfort,” an arc about one of the hospital’s own surgeons (Mark Harmon’s Bobby Caldwell), contracting the disease himself.
The drama also threaded all six seasons with depictions of the then-little-understood condition of autism, the disorder affecting the young son of beleaguered chief physician Donald Westphall (Ed Flanders), which informs the show’s famous 1988 finale.
In the end, the last word in “AIDS and Comfort” — if not also from those behind St. Elsewhere, about AIDS itself — fell, as most of the series’ final words did, to Westphall. In a closing scene during which a colleague dismissively suggests that maybe their now-discharged patient got what he deserved, he says:
“Yeah, I know that’s how I felt about it at first. Then I started to think, Who am I? Why should any of us be penalized, fatally, for choosing a certain lifestyle, especially when you realize that it all boils down to chance anyway? And I tell you something I don’t give a damn for all this talk about morality and vengeful gods and all that. If you have AIDS, you’re sick, you need help. That’s all that matters. And that’s why we’re here, right?”
On the annual World AIDS Day — the first, by the way, was in 1988 — it’s interesting to see how far medicine and the discussion of AIDS in general have progressed. And how the often-maligned great national entertainer/communicator called television — before big-screen movies Philadelphia (1993), Longtime Companion (1989), Parting Glances (1986) and Buddies (1985), which is considered the first-ever film about AIDS — facilitated that.
TV got there first. That’s the reality behind this fantasy.
If it was one.
