TV is the New Reading

“ER”: An era

ends on NBC

Series finale caps off 15 years of storytelling

The emergency room in Chicago’s County General Hospital is a hot little kitchen of chaos, pain, blood, drama and tears and third-year medical student John Carter can’t stand the heat. Chief resident Dr. Mark Greene discovers him his first day in the ambulance bay on the verge of throwing up and assures him he’s doing fine.

“See, there’s two kinds of doctors,” he said. “The kind that gets rid of their feelings. And the kind that keeps them. If you’re going to keep your feelings, you’re going to get sick from time to time. That’s just how it works.”

Thus began what became a 15-year saga, the pilot episode of “ER,” written by Michael Crichton, produced by John Wells and starring such names as George Clooney, Julianna Margulies, Noah Wyle, Mekhi Phifer, Angela Bassett, Parminder Nagra, Anthony Edwards, Maura Tierney, Goran Visnjik, Laura Innes, Gloria Rueben, John Stamos and John Leguizamo, among countless others.

And I don’t believe in 15 seasons I’ve sat through an entire episode. I’ve caught bits here and there, but it wasn’t a show I ever got into.

And it’s not fair for people who love and care about the show, now that it’s ending, for someone to memorialize it who has never seen it. It’s like a funeral where the pastor never met the deceased.

So I tracked down Jaye Jameson, a friend of mine who ... well, I’ll just let him explain:

“In 15 years, except for this year, I’ve never missed a single episode,” he said. Not only that, he’s got all nine DVD boxsets that have been released so far, and plans to purchase the remaining six as they become available.

Insights

I figured he’d have better insights than I would, and indeed he did. For one thing, he had the perspective to talk about what I’d been seeing on fan sites for a few years, now -- specifically, that the show had been going downhill.

“Not for me,” he said. “I don’t think the quality has gone down.”

Rather, he discussed the falloff in ratings the show has experienced in recent years and offered this theory: “They started repeating themselves.”

The rating losses began, he opined, when the original cast started bowing out -- in fact, probably the height of the show, he said, was the death of Edwards’ character Dr. Greene. While Crichton’s storyline traced the medical career of Wyle’s Carter from day one, he said, the triad that really drove the show was the relationships between Clooney as Doug Ross, Margulies as Nurse Carol Hathaway and Edwards as Greene, Ross’s boss and best friend. As the show progressed, Jameson said, the focus shifted to the relationship tensions between Wyle, Tierney as Abby Lockhart and Visnjik as Luka Kovac.

Also, apart from relationship dynamics, the show had returned to the well too many times with major characters dying, or family members touched by gang violence. While it made sense in the context of a general hospital located in a major city, he suggested the storylines were too similar dramatically.

That being said, he said, “ER” retained the power to tug at the heartstrings. Just the character arc for Tierney’s Abby Lockhart, he said, traced depression, bouts with alcoholism, marriage, divorce, engagements broken and honeymoons delayed, not to mention her mother (recurring guest star Sally Field’s) and her brother’s struggles with mental illness.

The emergency room in County General Hospital got everything, Jameson said. There was a prom episode, cheerleaders in a bus accident and no small amount of gang violence. And because it was a county hospital, he added, they had patients who couldn’t afford to go anywhere else.

Beyond Greene’s death, he recalled some of the standout storylines as Carter getting stabbed, Ross leaving the show, Rocket Romano getting crushed by a helicopter, and Jerry at the admin desk getting shot in a waiting area shootout as being some of the more compelling episodes.

‘Phenomenal’

Jameson said that while the writing on “ER” was “phenomenal,” part of the show’s attraction was hidden in its camerawork -- single takes and long, uninterrupted shots, sometimes spanning from one commercial break to the next, adding a subconscious immediacy to the action.

“That one shot just keeps you where the action is,” he said. “It never breaks away. If it breaks away, you start to break away yourself, emotionally. I think it kept you in there.”

The technique was used to good advantage during the live episode, he said. That episode, which aired in 1997, featured the NBC crew as documentarians filming a day in the life of the ER.

While the ratings have been soft in recent years, this season has been an opportunity to say goodbye to a loyal fan base, and the show has taken it and run.

“They’ve brought back almost everybody -- including Mark Greene, who is dead,” he said. “They brought him back for an episode. I won’t tell you how, but they even managed that trick.”

Also, he recalled the touching scene, immediately following Greene’s death, where Carter -- now one of the most senior members of the ER -- was able to share Greene’s advice from their encounter in the pilot episode, word for word, with another young doctor, Phifer as Greg Pratt.

“It’s been an interesting road,” he said, looking ahead to next week’s series finale. “I’m interested in seeing how they’re gonna end it.”

“Part of me is going to be sad to see it go,” he said.

A one-hour retrospective is slated at 7 p.m., preceding the two-hour series finale at 8 p.m. April 2 on NBC.

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