It’s been expected for a very long time, but as NBC gets ahead of the game in the States and announces the upcoming fall schedule, it has now been confirmed that the legendary ER will end following a 15th and final season.
I’ll admit to have only been following the current season’s showings on Channel 4 on and off, but this news saddens me as the hospital based drama has been one of the most consistently enjoyable and dramatically thrilling shows to grace TV screens across the world. We’ve loved these characters, cried with them, laughed with them and ER will be missed greatly. We will see hospital dramas again, but perhaps not of the like of ER.
There is a perceived wisdom that ER, inspired by Michael Crichton’s novel Five Patients, was perhaps past its best and should have been put out to pasture a couple of years ago. This is unfair - thanks to some great storylines surrounding Abby and Luka over recent seasons, the series seemed as tense and exciting as ever. I’d even go so far as to say that Forest Whitaker’s role as tragic patient Curtis Ames led to some of the most dramatic sequences across ER’s long history.
But, all good things must come to an end (unless of course you’re Law and Order which we’ll still be watching in the darkness of a dystopian future 200 years down the line). My fondness for ER highlights just how a TV show can anchor you to time and place, especially with a long-running show. Channel 4 debuted the series while I was at university - Wednesday evening at 10pm. It was a sacred time, a break from my dissertation (some old toot about Marxist cycles of commerce within cult TV fandom - I started early!). Doctor Who is fish fingers and chips at Grandma’s; ER is a bottle of beer and bag of crisps in a Salford student flat. Happy times.
ER will long be remembered as one of US TV’s greats, up there with M*A*S*H, Seinfeld, Friends and um… Starsky and Hutch. Let’s hope the final season will be a celebration of all that was fantastic about the lives and loves of the staff of the ER at County General.
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