Tuesday, March 31, 2009

PEOPLE COME IN HERE AND THEY'RE SICK AND DYING AND BLEEDING, AND THEY NEED OUR HELP. HELPING THEM IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN HOW WE FEEL: It's time to resume our omnibus recap of all things ER in advance of Thursday's finale, and we ought to figure out in broad brush strokes what the show got right and why so many of us have so much affection for it so many years after many of us stopped watching regularly. Alan and I were emailing about this last week, and here's (an expanded version of) what I said, a list to which you'll no-doubt add:

A. Like The Wire, ultimately the System always won. Sure, they could save individual patients every once in a while, but poor people kept getting screwed by the system, perhaps-well-meaning administrators thwarted doctors efforts and lots of people died despite the doctors' best efforts -- and on that, perhaps the link is to Hill Street Blues before it in that slot, which certainly also was fine with unhappy endings. Mark Greene had a grim and unpleasant life, and he died married to someone who didn't make him that happy anyway and with a daughter who despised him. Thank goodness that never really improved. If you want to mark the dividing line between Great ER and Not-So-Great ER, it's when Weaver and Romano became the doctors' enemies as opposed to just part of the system.

B. They moved so fast that they didn't care that you didn't completely understand what was going on with all the terminology. You figured it out just fine. It was an action show that happened to be set in a hospital, where you learned about the characters by what they did as much as through the dialogue itself -- and the patients weren't necessarily anvils for what was going on in the characters' lives.

C. Doug Ross, classic Loveable Rogue Hero.

D. They're re-airing season one on TNT now. Start TiVoing it. (LLL: next Tuesday.) Look at how completely young and immature John Truman Carter was then. It'll help you realize his slow growth over time.

E. Carter-Benton. TV's best bromance, and one that they really held off on satisfying for a long, long time (until Carter's trip to rehab).

F. Strong, complex female characters -- Hathaway, Boulet, Corday, Lockhart.

G. Peter Benton as Shaft. Peter Benton as lover. Peter Benton as dad. Peter Benton as doctor. Peter Benton as everything other than that Mississippi episode, which I'd rather forget. One of my top 2-3 favorite tv characters of the past twenty years.

[Previously, on our ER retrospective: the early years, noteworthy guest stars, romance in the ER, the Very Special Travels of ER, memorable character exits.]

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