For many, the low point came in Episode 209, when the eminently dislikeable Dr Robert Romano - whose arm had already been shorn off in one helicopter accident - was killed by a second chopper falling on his head. Each of their departures seemed to mark a gradual diminution of the show's quality.
Carter, who had entered the emergency room a clumsy medical student, finally left it as an experienced senior doctor after 11 years.
Ross left County General for Seattle after five seasons, Greene died from a brain tumour after eight. Greene, meanwhile, was the gentle everyman whose first marriage was failing, and who later learned to love again in the arms of Dr Elizabeth Corday (Alex Kingston). In season two's "Hell and High Water" episode, he saved a young boy from a storm drain in dramatic scenes designed to tug open the tear ducts of anxious viewers everywhere. Ross was ER's loveable rogue, a philandering drunk redeemed by his magnificent bedside manner and skill as a paediatrician.
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Her relationship with (Dr) Ross became a televisual romance to rival Ross (Geller) and Rachel - and one of the joys of the final series has been learning that the pair stayed together since leaving Chicago nine years ago. Audiences warmed to her so much, however, that she was allowed to live, and immediately added to the permanent cast. Hathaway, played by Julianna Margulies, was originally slated to shuffle off in that pilot episode. No one had seen that before."Īs Carter helped to deliver a baby in episode one, nearby, head nurse Carol Hathaway lay close to death after a suicide attempt. They were doing 17-hour shifts and their home lives were a mess. "Before then, doctors on television were godlike, they did everything right, and every week they'd see a patient and fix them. "It was one of the first shows that made doctors fallible," says Stuart Levine, assistant managing editor at Variety magazine. It shared all of that show's idealism, but little of its optimism. And with its workplace details and specialist jargon it paved the way for The West Wing. With its characters striving to save lives in an underfunded, under-resourced system, it anticipated The Wire. In the halls of ER's inner-city hospital, its viewers saw an everyday heroism that was absent from the more rarefied environs of the Bartlett White House, or Jack Bauer's counter-terrorism unit. The doctors and nurses of County General replaced the superhuman ciphers of Doctor Kildare and Marcus Welby, MD. It earned itself a permanent place in the schedule: 10pm Thursday, the same sanctified slot formerly reserved for NBC's landmark shows LA Law and Hill Street Blues.ĮR did for the medical drama in the Nineties what Hill Street Blues had done for cop shows in the Eighties. The show premiered three days before Friends, another huge NBC success and reached its audience peak - a whopping 47.8 million - when an episode aired straight after the finale of Seinfeld in May 1998. And the pay-to-view cable channel HBO has stolen not only some of the networks' audience share, but some of their reputation for top-quality drama, too.ĮR's fate was tied to that of other scheduled shows in a way we might not understand in the UK. Since that first season, however, audiences have fragmented thanks to cable, the internet and the DVD boxset.
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Since its 1994 debut, ER has won 22 Emmy Awards and been nominated for 122: more than any other TV show, ever. But in its lifetime ER has also been party to a steep decline in the networks' commercial and cultural power.
The last decade has been a golden age for US TV drama, with critically-acclaimed cable shows such as The Sopranos, Mad Men and The Wire complementing quality network fare like The West Wing, 24 and Lost. When the final season signed off in the States last month, it drew the largest audience for a drama since The X-Files finale in 2002 today, however, even the most popular network shows struggle to reach 20 million. It was the world's most watched TV drama for 10 years. In its mid-Nineties heyday, ER boasted weekly US audiences of 30 million. But it also leaves the airwaves - after a 15-year, 332-episode run - as the last US drama consistently able to attract such a substantial viewership. With its hyper-realistic hospital setting, its hyper-complex narrative and especially its hyper-kinetic aesthetic, ER was the first show of its kind.
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