David Bushman: Is it true you handed Bruce Paltrow a list of ideas for the series finale and he said that the snow globe ending was the best option?

Tom Fontana: He actually said it was the least bad option.

DB: When and where did you come up with that idea?

TF: We always thought we were going to be canceled, from the very first season, so we always had this list “in the kitchen,” and whenever somebody got a stupid idea of what the last episode would be you’d just write it on a sheet of paper. And I remember one was — it’s just so funny to think about now — one was Westphall calls Morrison into his office and he says, “I have something to tell you that I’ve never told any human being.” And Morrison says, “What is it, Dr. Westphall?” And he goes, “I was the second gunman on the grassy knoll And now that I’ve told you” — and he pulls out a gun — “I have to kill you.” And he shot Morrison.

There was another one, which was — you know how at the end of episodes Westphall and Auschlander would sit in Auschlander’s office and talk about philosophical things? You know, they would just talk about life. Well, there was a window behind Auschlander’s desk, and we wanted to have Auschlander and Westphall facing each other in front of the desk talking and there’s suddenly a flash of light, and Auschlander says, “What was that?” And then the whole thing ends because there’s a nuclear bomb.

DB: So, never really planned to go out with a whimper, did you?

TF: No, we didn’t. When you think about it the snow globe is probably the smallest version, which is probably why Bruce thought it was the least bad.

DB: Did you think there was any realistic chance that St. Elsewhere would have either of those two endings?

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TF: No, not really. The thing is, if Bruce had said yes, we probably would have written it, because we were like — you know, the great thing about writing that show was Bruce had a wonderful capacity for sort of letting us run free and then pulling us back just before we fell over the edge of the cliff. I think some of our best episodes were those in which Bruce encouraged us to push the envelope, like the two episodes on the history of the hospital, “Time Heals.” Masius and John Tinker and I were like, “We have this idea!” And Bruce was like, “OK. It’s gonna be expensive, because you’re talking about” — I think it was three or four different time periods, so we had to re-dress the set, we had to have cars, medical equipment, the whole schmiel. And he said, “If you guys are really passionate about doing this then we’ll do it. But it’s gonna mean that in another episode we can’t spend as much as we usually spend.” So he was always encouraging us. … He put up with stuff that mortal men would not have put up with.

DB: I was going to ask when you started thinking about an ending, but it sounds like you were thinking about it almost from the beginning.

TF: Yeah, because we literally always thought we were gonna get canceled. Do you know the story about how we were canceled at the end of the first season?

DB: Yes, and you were also the lowest-rated show renewed, right?

TF: We were the second-lowest-rated show. We were ninety-ninth out of 100 shows. The 100th was Cheers. And they renewed both of our shows.

DB: In terms of the last season and the real ending, when did the writers sit down and come up with all the ideas that you fed Bruce?

TF: Well, we had been coming up with them over the whole life of the series.

DB: So even in the last season, when you knew for a fact that the show was going to end, you went back to the list you had been drawing up all along?

TF: Yeah, the ones that were “in the kitchen” were the ones that we went in and pitched to him. The other one which we wanted to do was Masius and I wanted to write the reunion episode. Because at that point it was Brady Bunch reunion, there were all these reunions of shows that had been on like twenty years before. So we wanted to write the reunion show now and shoot it as our last episode, and it was pretty stupid.

DB: John Masius was gone from the show by the last year, right?

TF: Technically we both were. I wanted to come back to New York. I was sort of over living in Los Angeles, so I became a consultant on the show and John Tinker and Channing Gibson took the creative reigns over, and Masius left at the beginning of the last season.

DB: The credits on the finale say, “Teleplay by Bruce Paltrow and Mark Tinker,” and story by you, John Tinker, and Channing Gibson. So there’s no credit for John Masius, and you don’t have a teleplay credit, but I’m assuming you were pretty involved in writing that teleplay.

TF: The reality is Bruce and Mark didn’t write any of it. And they’d be the first to admit it. What happened was — this is really terrible to admit — we were like, “Wow, if we put all of our names on it we’d each get paid like fifty percent.” It wasn’t like we had to divide the money in five ways. I think back then the Writers Guild rule was we all had to be paid half of all the money, so it was a way to make more money from NBC.

DB: So how was it written?

TF: I would say — again, my memory is a little faulty — I think John Tinker and Channing worked on half of it and I worked on the other half.

DB: Were you all in a room together?

TF: No.

DB: So you were off in New York writing it?

TF: I was off in New York writing it. They were in Los Angeles, in Studio City, writing it.

DB: Did you split it by acts? Like you took two acts and they took two acts?

TF: I think, if memory serves, we did it by stories, like I did one story, they did another story.

DB: Whose story did you do? You always liked writing for Westphall, didn’t you?

TF: Yes, and I did write that speech he gives about Auschlander.

DB: Do you remember what else you wrote?

TF: I’m trying to remember. I haven’t watched it —

DB: I can tell you what else is going on. Craig and his wife are leaving for Cleveland.

TF: That I’m pretty sure was Tinker and Gibson.

DB: OK, Jack is debating whether to go back to Seattle to his wife, they’re turning the hospital back over to the archdiocese, Auschlander passes away —

TF: I think I wrote that stuff.

DB: I know that Ed Flanders had some personal problems that led to him leaving the show. What was the process like getting him to come back for the finale?

TF: Ed was tragic, because he was so incredibly talented, and so awesome to work with when he was sober. The tragedy of alcoholism was really what was upsetting for us. So when we parted ways for the last season — I wasn’t really there on a day-to-day basis, but it was not an easy thing to do, because we all loved him. That was the hardest part. And he represented on the show really the father figure of the series. It was painful for everybody — the writers, Bruce and Mark, and the actors on the show — to watch the alcohol take control of him.

DB: At what point did you approach him about coming back, and how essential was it for him to come back?

TF: It was actually relatively simple, if memory serves. I think he had time to reflect, he had stopped drinking for a while, he had a house up in California, so getting him to come back was not all that difficult. He loved doing the show, so he was happy that we wanted him back and he was happy that he could be a part of it.

DB: What about the idea for the homage to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, when Jack says goodbye and they all hug?

TF: That was John Tinker. What was my idea was, “Let’s do an homage to the end of every television show,” so we had The Fugitive, we had M*A*S*H.

DB: When Westphall makes that speech and you see everybody in the cafeteria, it’s really poignant. That’s the one scene where almost everybody is together in one place. What was the mood like on set? Were people feeling that?

TF: Yeah, it was difficult, because we were all basically saying goodbye to each other, and the way show business works you all say we’ll stay in touch and blah blah blah but you never really know, and if I had known that I would never see Ed again — I mean I’m glad I didn’t know, but I never saw him again, he was dead. That wasn’t the last thing we shot. I can’t remember what the scene was, but that was also incredibly powerful because everyone was saying goodbye. It’s tough when you’re a team, when you’re a family, and then all of a sudden it’s never going to be again. I was just mourning the fact that this part of my life, which was my first job in television, was over, and again, the way the business is you never really know if you’re gonna work again.

DB: Who made the determination that Auschlander was going to die?

TF: We all agreed that in the last episode he would die. He was supposed to die after the first six episodes in the first season, but we just all loved Norman so we kept him around.

DB: So let’s finally talk about the ending ending. Was that idea traceable to one person, the whole snow globe and Tommy Westphall concept?

TF: I don’t want to sound like I’m boasting, but I think it was my idea.

DB: And what were you trying to say?

TF: Because we had talked about doing this reunion show, because I just thought these proposed ideas were all so horrible, what I wanted to say was that this show, this series took place in the mind of an autistic child. It is not real, and it’s over now. And that’s why a lot of people were angry that we did that, but a lot of people thought it was fantastic too.

DB: Do you remember how Bruce and the other writer-producers reacted when they first heard it?

TF: I think in a way it was like Nina’s heart being transplanted and Jack listening to the heart. It felt right to us, that somehow it was tied to the imagination.

DB: So no red flags?

TF: No, everybody embraced it. You know, I still have the snow globe. The irony of things is that the whole Tommy Westphall connected to I don’t remember how many television shows. The first time I saw it it just completely devastated me, because it was like what Matt Zoller Seitz said about the show being a speck in the universe:

We believed that our show was just a speck in the universe, and then it turned out that our show was the universe.

DB: Did you expect the kind of feedback that you got?

TF: No, it was a real lesson for me. I figured the people who watch this show know we do this kind of thing. I would say fifty-percent of the reaction we got was extremely angry. And it was a real lesson to me, given that it was my first series, how much people care, how much the audience cares about these characters that they lived with. The truth is, there’s no way to please everybody. I thought the ending of The Sopranos was brilliant, because it wasn’t an ending. It was just another moment, and what happened was unimportant compared to the fact that it was just another moment.

DB: So do you not try to figure out what happens to Tony?

TF: I don’t think it matters. I didn’t sit and go, “Oh, I wonder what happened to Tony.” I just sat there going, “That is so cool.”

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DB: What other finales have you really admired?

TF: I did admire the Mary Tyler Moore Show ending. I thought that was near perfect. They took it to sentimentality up to a point, and then they made a joke, the way they had everybody as a group moving toward the Kleenex. It could have just been sappy but they turned it into a joke. And then they all left and she looked back and she looked sad and then she smiled and then she turned off the light. It was perfect. I thought The Fugitive was a great ending. There was that show — it was a space show, I didn’t watch it very often, but the last episode, the guy was suspended in space, like forever. I just thought, “That’s a ballsy ending.” It was really awesomely terrifying, because he could see the Earth. All he wanted to do was get back to Earth, but he was just going to float in space until he was dead.

DB: Do you think audacity is a prerequisite for a great ending?

TF: I don’t think it is, because I guess you could say the end of The Sopranos was audacious, but in my mind it was just a moment. It was so real in it just being a moment in time. But I guess you could say it was audacious because people would have expected the shootout or whatever they expected.

DB: I think what you guys did was pretty audacious.

TF: Yeah, I think we were consciously trying to be audacious. I think the most important thing, especially for an hour drama if you have a number of characters, is you shouldn’t wrap up every single story, because in the world of the show the story’s going to continue … except for the poor guy who’s suspended in space.

Paley Matters is a publication of The Paley Center for Media.