On NCIS' Mark Harmon, One of the First Sexiest Men Alive

My brother Nolan and I were channel surfing recently, and I asked him to switch the channel to AXN. "Who watches that anymore?" he asked me. I was taken aback for a few seconds, part of my brain still wired to those days when we dreaded switching cable networks for fear of losing AXN and shows like The Amazing Race, Survivor, all three CSIs, and Lost. Then I saw the increasingly familiar Fox icon on the screen, and I realized that, yes, we don't watch AXN as much as we used to.

These days, we're Fox people, because of Bones, NCIS, Burn Notice and White Collar. When I say we, I mean my family as a whole. Personally, though, given the little time I have left to watch TV, I only allow myself to follow Bones and NCIS.

I've written about Bones recently. Now, it's time for NCIS to take the limelight. One NCIS actor, to be specific: Mark Harmon. In NCIS, he plays the silver-haired Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs, who heads the Major Case Response Team.

For the longest time, I was wondering why Harmon looked familiar. I thought that maybe I'd seen him in one of those old movies they show on cable, or that he'd played supporting roles in the movies I'd seen as a kid. I was partly right, and partly wrong.

Last night, I caught a feature on Mark Harmon on the cable channel Bio and I finally made the Harmon connection: He used to star in a hospital drama my mother and, by default, I watched religiously: St. Elsewhere. For quite some time, he was what George Clooney was to E.R., and what Patrick Dempsey and Eric Dane are to Grey's Anatomy. The Bio feature said that Chicago Hope tried to revive Harmon's sexiness factor to compete with E.R.

St. Elsewhere ran from 1982 to 1988, which means that I sort of grew up with the show, even though I'd forgotten all about it. Having been reminded of the series, I now remember that the show was set in a decrepit teaching hospital called St. Eligius. Three memories stand out: One, the hospital always seemed to be struggling financially; two, the episodes were mostly dark but funny; three, the character I loved, Harmon's Dr. Robert Caldwell, was dying. I didn't even remember that Denzel Washington was on it!

While watching the Bio feature, I went to YouTube and searched for St. Elsewhere's theme and listened to it. Some vague memories and feelings resurfaced. I'm going to guess now that St. Elsewhere sort of introduced me to the themes of life, death, and dying. I was a suburban girl living in a sleepy village, reading only Nancy Drew and the kiddie books in the grade school library. None of the people I knew had died—my grandfather would pass away in 1990; a neighbor's dad would be killed the same year, if I remember right—but around that time, my only window to life was the telly.

It could be phantom memory, but now I'm recalling some sadness and fear over Dr. Robert Caldwell's descent into dying. First, he was this charming doctor; next, he became a troubled promiscuous man who engaged in one casual relationship after another. Suddenly, he's HIV positive and isn't allowed to work at St. Eligius anymore. Most everything, except the death part, was too hard for me to understand.

I may have asked my mother several times if he was going to die. I remember believing, when I was a child, that when a character died, the actor could have died also. If you were watching McGyver at this time, you would remember that his archnemesis, Murdock, always "died" but never did.

The Bio feature on Harmon also revealed how much of a serious actor he was. While he's had more success on TV than on film, he has always opted for the more challenging roles, the roles that offered him growth. He had substance as a TV actor, and this earned him many Emmy and Golden Globe nominations and the privilege of being People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive in 1986.

He still looks pretty sexy in NCIS. He's aged well, if I may say so myself.

Funny that I'm only discovering this now. But during St. Elsewhere's prime, it wasn't as easy to find information about your favorite television shows or favorite actors. In fact, I think I'm still doing some back-stalking on Pierce Brosnan with Remington Steele in mind. Oh, but that's another story.

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