I’m really going to miss good old ‘ER’ on Thursday nights
Any of the rest of you reading this big fans of “ER”? You know — the long-running medical drama that anchored NBC’s Thursday night television lineup for about 200 years?
I guess it only seems like 200 years. And, frankly, the show has become just a tad worn and probably ready for the end. This is the last season, and they’re pulling out some stops to get former series actors back into the episodes before the end. (I just saw something about unsubstantiated rumors that the mega-star of the founding series cast, George Clooney, will probably do a cameo, but NBC isn’t confirming it. Big surprise.)
I truly have been an avid fan of the show. Sure, it’s little more than a prime-time soap opera, but it was much more than that for many seasons. The writing was great, the acting superb. I’m not sure exactly when it began to change.
But at some point in recent years, “ER” changed from good drama to sappy melodrama. I overlooked the way they first chopped off Dr. Romano’s arm with an errant helicopter blade — then two seasons (I think it was two) later killed Romano off by having, yes, a helicopter fall out of the sky and land on him.
Perhaps, though, Romano’s demise was the beginning of the end of the really best “ER” episodes. I mean, come on, nobody’s THAT unlucky with helicopters in real-life are they??
I can’t think of any especially odd or quirky characters from big-city life that haven’t been in and out of the “ER” at one time or another. Perhaps, oddly enough, they never had a Chicago injury lawyer or other honest-to-goodness “ambulance chaser” come along. I don’t recall much crossover between “ER” doctors and lawyers. But probably there were some.
So, even though I’ll admit “ER” has fallen on hard times, I would have been perfectly willing to watch it a couple of more seasons just to see what sort of interesting stuff was going on with the younger, newer generation of doctors. Ah, well. All good television eventually comes to an end. Guess I’ll be cast back onto watching “West Wing” reruns …
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:19 pm
I was really into ER when it started, then lost interest. I started watching it again two or three seasons ago and have been recording every episode this season as it’s going to be the last. Unfortunately, my son got ahold of the remote and erased everything on our DVR! I’m not sure how many episodes we lost or what was going on in the show when we lost them…
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:32 pm
OUCH! That had to hurt. We use our DVR so much it is miserable having to watch “live” TV — which I now define as TV with non-stop commercial interruptions. The beauty of the DVR for us is not as much keeping episodes as being able to watch episodes and whizzing quickly past the commercials.
Hope you didn’t lose anything of great value to you!