Daily Inspiration Quote by Mark Harmon

It reads like the kind of compliment that’s doing two jobs at once: honoring a piece of TV history while carefully refusing to turn nostalgia into performance. Mark Harmon’s “certainly” is the tell. It’s a small, actorly piece of hedging that signals he’s not auditioning for fandom; he’s offering professional respect. In an industry where everyone is expected to have a hot take, the restraint is the point.

Context matters because St. Elsewhere isn’t just “a great show” in the generic sense. It’s a badge from the era when network drama started acting like prestige drama: ensemble casts, moral ambiguity, messy institutional politics, and storylines that didn’t wrap neatly before the commercial break. Praising it is a way of aligning yourself with craft and ambition, a subtle claim about what “good television” should look like. Coming from Harmon - whose own career is built on long-running, procedural comfort (NCIS being the obvious example) - the compliment also reads as a nod to the genre’s DNA: the hospital drama’s narrative sophistication feeding the later cop-and-feds machine.

The subtext is also reputational. Calling St. Elsewhere “certainly” great acknowledges the critical consensus without trying to compete with it. No anecdote, no namedropping, no self-centering. It’s a clean salute across generations of television labor: writers, casts, and directors who made something durable enough that, decades later, a working actor can invoke it as shorthand for quality - and everyone in the room knows exactly what he means.