R.I.P. ER
by Krishna Andavolu
APRIL 3, 2009 TAGS:
If you haven’t been paying attention to prime time drama over the last few years you might be surprised to hear that ER is still on TV.
A quick glance at the opening credits is equally disorienting: Uncle Jesse? (John Stamos), Bend it Like Beckham? (Parminder Nagra), Did Stella get her groove back and become a doctor? (Angela Bassett). The familiar names, Clooney, Wyle, Margulies, have been gone for a while. But the halls of the fictitious County Hospital in Chicago still ring with the familiar calls for CT scans, EKG’s, IV’s and tox screens.
Or, it did. Until last night.
Capping a 15-year run, a period of time that saw the power of primetime television reach a summit and begin the slow dissolution of its grip on viewers, ER broadcast its final episode Thursday night. The series lasted longer than most people expected. It even outlived its creator, novelist and screenwriter Michael Crichton, who died....
That ER made it on the air in the first place was a result of television innovation. Crichton, with his Harvard Medical School training, wrote a screenplay laden with medical jargon, so thick that some producers thought audiences wouldn’t be able to relate. But NBC, looking to replace its graying legal series, L.A. LAW, greenlighted the pilot with the help of Stephen Spielberg, who served as executive producer. Audiences quickly grew fond of being challenged, and a new type of workplace drama emerged.
Fealty to workplace ‘realism,’ helped the show’s integrate its setting with the development of character rather than excuse for action like in Hill Street Blues or earlier dramas.
Stars were born (George Clooney), patients were saved and the general public had a window into the highly skilled and often volatile world of triage medical care.
Technical achievements included the frequent use of a Steady-Cam that allowed a camera person to follow the action down corridors and through hallways. The first season, according to some estimates, used steady-cam shots 75 percent of the time. Actual medical professionals wrote for the show. And the lineage of other series that took cues from ER’s success is long and decorated: CSI, The West Wing, The Wire.
But above all, ER's reign solidified the notion that the daily lives of smart people can be made interesting. Not just cops, robbers and spies but work-a-day professionals.
Of course, the stakes make the show: the actions in an emergency room determine life and death, and The West Wing’s location, the White House, is the seat of international power. But in the years since ER has been on the air, the preponderance of work-related television shows suggests that the stakes of a job can be high or low, (take The Office), audiences will still care about seeing people at work, because we, as Americans, are so often at work (or at least we were).
Perhaps the demise of ER signals the end of cerebral drama. Starting this fall, the comforting, but hardly stimulating, banter of Jay Leno will fill the 10 PM timeslot that ER so ruthlessly dominated in the 1990s. If that isn’t an indication of a changing media landscape, I don’t know what is.
Krishna Andavolu is managing editor of Obit.
A quick glance at the opening credits is equally disorienting: Uncle Jesse? (John Stamos), Bend it Like Beckham? (Parminder Nagra), Did Stella get her groove back and become a doctor? (Angela Bassett). The familiar names, Clooney, Wyle, Margulies, have been gone for a while. But the halls of the fictitious County Hospital in Chicago still ring with the familiar calls for CT scans, EKG’s, IV’s and tox screens. Or, it did. Until last night.
Capping a 15-year run, a period of time that saw the power of primetime television reach a summit and begin the slow dissolution of its grip on viewers, ER broadcast its final episode Thursday night. The series lasted longer than most people expected. It even outlived its creator, novelist and screenwriter Michael Crichton, who died....
That ER made it on the air in the first place was a result of television innovation. Crichton, with his Harvard Medical School training, wrote a screenplay laden with medical jargon, so thick that some producers thought audiences wouldn’t be able to relate. But NBC, looking to replace its graying legal series, L.A. LAW, greenlighted the pilot with the help of Stephen Spielberg, who served as executive producer. Audiences quickly grew fond of being challenged, and a new type of workplace drama emerged.
Fealty to workplace ‘realism,’ helped the show’s integrate its setting with the development of character rather than excuse for action like in Hill Street Blues or earlier dramas.
Stars were born (George Clooney), patients were saved and the general public had a window into the highly skilled and often volatile world of triage medical care.
Technical achievements included the frequent use of a Steady-Cam that allowed a camera person to follow the action down corridors and through hallways. The first season, according to some estimates, used steady-cam shots 75 percent of the time. Actual medical professionals wrote for the show. And the lineage of other series that took cues from ER’s success is long and decorated: CSI, The West Wing, The Wire.
But above all, ER's reign solidified the notion that the daily lives of smart people can be made interesting. Not just cops, robbers and spies but work-a-day professionals.Of course, the stakes make the show: the actions in an emergency room determine life and death, and The West Wing’s location, the White House, is the seat of international power. But in the years since ER has been on the air, the preponderance of work-related television shows suggests that the stakes of a job can be high or low, (take The Office), audiences will still care about seeing people at work, because we, as Americans, are so often at work (or at least we were).
Perhaps the demise of ER signals the end of cerebral drama. Starting this fall, the comforting, but hardly stimulating, banter of Jay Leno will fill the 10 PM timeslot that ER so ruthlessly dominated in the 1990s. If that isn’t an indication of a changing media landscape, I don’t know what is.
Krishna Andavolu is managing editor of Obit.
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