Carried Out Script-First : Report of Demise of Former NBC Exec on ‘St. Elsewhere’ Is Slightly Exaggerated

TV series producers often kill off a character when an actor leaves the show. NBC’s “St. Elsewhere” team now holds the rare distinction of killing off a network executive.

The incident occurred on Wednesday night’s episode, when Denzel Washington, as Dr. Philip Chandler, read the following item from a list of deceased patients: “Sagansky, Jeffrey, 32-year-old executive, white male. Cause of death: intra-cerebral hemorrhage; collapsed in a screening room between 8 and 10 on a Friday night.”

In real life, Sagansky is the NBC senior vice president who resigned earlier this year to become president of production at Tri-Star Pictures.

When Sagansky’s move was officially announced, the show’s writers and producers decided to let the whole world know he was departing--sort of.

“We wrote that in as kind of a farewell gesture on our part,” producer-writer Tom Fontana explained. Sagansky discovered the in-joke when he read the script, Fontana said, and his only objection was that he didn’t want to kick off in a movie theater, as originally written.

“He called and said, ‘This is the last note ever I’m going to give you on the show: Could you make it a screening room?’ ”

Sagansky, contacted Thursday morning, noted that “this isn’t the first time I died. When I left the (David) Gerber company--we were doing ‘The New F.B.I.’--they had me shot and killed while sitting on a park bench.”

Sagansky said he received numerous calls about his “demise” after the “St. Elsewhere” segment aired. “A lot of people take that show very seriously,” he said.

The joke has a secondary punch line in the reference to the time of death: Fontana noted that “Friday between 8 and 10” is an ailing spot in NBC’s otherwise generally healthy schedule.

Since there was no other mention of “Sagansky,” the line undoubtedly slipped in under the heads of most of viewing America. “It was literally for him,” Fontana said, “although I did get a call from somebody in New York this morning. . . .”

It wasn’t the show’s first in-joke. Earlier this season, actor Byron Stewart, appearing as a hospital janitor, mistook guest star Timothy Van Patten for someone named “Salami.” Van Patten had played Salami and Stewart one of his high school basketball teammates on “The White Shadow”--the previous show from “St. Elsewhere” executive Bruce Paltrow.

“We’ve been putting these kinds of things in from the beginning,” Fontana said. “Some people get them and some people don’t.”