No plot spoilers here for anyone who plans to start indulging in all 15 seasons when they land on Netflix on Tuesday, but the very last thing we saw in the final ER, in 2009, was hugely moving in this oddly surprising way.
Everyone and no one was in the frame. As doctors triaged an influx of casualties from an industrial accident, the camera pulled back from the ambulance bay to show the exterior of County General Hospital for the first and only time. The theme tune cut in with the camera still in retreat. The message was that life, and the work of saving lives, go on, even if the show did not.
I remember being sort of stunned by this at the time, though compared with today’s avalanche of television chatter, ER went out with more of a whimper than a bang, and its legacy has faded more than it should.
Perhaps this is because it was, at heart, a procedural, and as the scripted-television industry exploded in the 2000s, old-school linear-TV workhorses like ER were overshadowed by a newer generation of expensive dramas that pursued their novelistic storytelling ambitions over smaller, binge-friendly episode counts.
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ER was not a novel. It was definitely TV. For most of its life it thrived without online episode deconstructions or scene-by-scene analyses. Its sky-high ratings alone were enough to confirm its success. One of its original cast members, George Clooney, was propelled to stardom before the end of his first shift.
Today another of that original cast, Noah Wyle, leads the HBO Max medical drama The Pitt, which is often billed as “grittier” than its predecessor. That tag, though not wrong, risks erasing ER’s impact in 1994, when its first crop of scrubs-wearers pushed their trolleys on to the screen, blasting out urgent-sounding medical jargon as doors flapped behind them.
The BBC’s Cardiac Arrest had, not long before, shocked viewers by situating doctors, nurses and hospital managers in a post-Thatcher environment of cynicism and despair. Casualty had, in its own bleak way, showed that admission to A&E was very typically someone’s worst day.
ER set out to show something else: chaos. Tracking the staff’s messy working days and their even messier personal relationships was a Steadicam. The hand-held camera, which allowed for nimble yet fluid filming, had not been previously used in television production to the extent that ER used it. The show’s influence was such that soon everyone was at it. But the technique initially startled its audience, imbuing the action with a rush of excitement that is hard to explain now.
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ER was good for much longer than is remembered. When I think of the show I think not of the 1994 cast but of the stalwarts of its midlife – Laura Innes, Maura Tierney, Goran Visnjic, Mekhi Phifer, Parminder Nagra, Scott Grimes – whose characters commuted through an often snowbound Chicago to their inevitable destiny with trauma, frustration, blood and unreasonable demands.
You could learn a lot about the United States from watching ER. Yes, cop shows hinged on US gun culture, but on ER you saw what bullets did to bodies – it lingered on the aftermath. Possibly even more confusing to viewers on this side of the Atlantic were the conversations about insurance, which revealed the horrifying existence of a medical underclass.
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Before that CGI-enhanced exterior shot in the finale, County General frequently manifested as a borderline subterranean world on the edge of a dystopia. There was something fatalistic about the show. Anyone who fought for change was soon put in their place. Leisure time was a mirage. Workplace safety was patchy at best.
ER has now been off air longer than it was on. The star performer of US network television, it delivered such big bucks for NBC that its 10pm-Thursday time slot is still spoken about with the sort of reverence reserved for things that make piles of money.
Now the show is already well into its afterlife as a quietly valuable slab of back-catalogue content for streamers that fancy increasing the amount of time subscribers spend on their platforms.
Its arrival on Netflix, the result of a licensing arrangement between the streamer and ER’s maker, Warner Bros Television, comes at a pivotal time, with Netflix vying to acquire the studio and streaming businesses of Warner Bros in a whopping deal that could leave several of its competitors languishing on the operating table.
ER’s presence on Netflix should give the show’s reputation another shot in the arm and also do its bit to help the streamer’s subscriber-retention rates. Viewers who were around in the 1990s may well, understandably, baulk at the commitment required to undertake a rewatch. But for those who missed out, it’s best to plunge in. Don’t let up. If you watch those 331 episodes at the pace with which they were first consumed, you’ll reach the finale in approximately 2041.
ER streams on Netflix from Tuesday, February 10th
