Carol Hathaway turns to Doug Ross in their bed in Seattle and gives him good news. The kidney from one of their dead patients has been given successfully to “some doctor” in Chicago.
And I, in my living room in London, burst into tears. That wasn’t even the last episode of ER, but the valedictory note was enough to dissolve me. Hathaway and Ross didn’t know it, but the “some doctor” was John Carter, the most luckless character in television history and their former comrade-in-arms at Cook County General. It was heart-breaking they didn’t know (especially after meeting Sam and Neela and reeling off a list of names to see if they had any mutual friends, yet mysteriously not including Carter’s, presumably to avoid an interchange that would tip them off about the kidney’s destination. Would Doug really ask about Anspaugh before Carter? Unless Carol had heard through a nurse friend that Carter was in Darfur. But if so, why didn’t Doug mention the nurse? It’s possible I’m overthinking this); but it also felt completely right. They had moved on, and as they have, so has television: ER, once the coolest kid on the televisual block has, after fifteen years, reached the end of the road.
Gates, my favourite of the newbies on ER, didn’t even recognise Carter when he turned back up again (to the wonderful strains of “The Town Where You Belong” by Earlimart, a brilliant LA band that deserves 20,000% more recognition that it gets on either side of the Atlantic). “Are you the one that got that nurse pregnant and moved up to Seattle?” he wondered. “Come on!” Cecile and I shouted in unison. I mean, nice that Gates got the right season, but isn’t getting stabbed and becoming a drug addict the sort of gossip that would last nine years, rather than starting a family with your girlfriend and moving to the Pacific Northwest? Added to which, can you even imagine back in the day anyone confusing Ross with Carter? Carter sighed and said: “No, that was someone else.” Later on, he had to explain to Banfield why he was on dialysis: “some years ago, I was involved in an incident here. I was stabbed by a patient and a med student was killed.” God, it really was “some years ago”, and it wasn’t any med student, it was Lucy! Carter’s voice and face registered that knowledge, but it meant nothing to Banfield. After having his competency constantly questioned – which is so 1995, and Neela ain’t no Benton – he ended up talking to some random doctor who didn’t know him. “I’m, well, new, sort of,” he explained.
Oh hell no. Excuse me? Unacceptable. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, it isn’t that Carter got new; it’s that everyone else got, um, newer. Carter was new in 1994, and I know, because I was there watching him. That shot of Greene staring at someone that was in the old, good, original credits? That was the last time Carter was new, and Greene died seven years ago. So shut up, everyone, and step off my boy. “It’s like bizarro ER,” he observed. “Kind of the same, but every little thing is different.” To which the world’s viewers sighed as one: “Amen.”
But time passes. Carter was right. ER isn’t the ER it once was, the people have changed, the show has changed. The last series has brought constant reminders of absent friends – Carter, Ross, Hathaway, Weaver, Corday, Benton, even poor dead Greene have all turned up again. The nostalgia has been practically overwhelming, even before Rachel Greene, former sweet toddler, turned nightmare teen, turned medical student, rocked up. And really the only continuum has been the viewer and the set. Even the set changed over the years. And God knows this viewer has – I was ten when ER began, my mother watched the first episode and decided there was too much blood, so I had to watch it for years in my brother’s room without her knowledge. She was utterly right, in my adolescence I was traumatised by many episodes of ER, tales of industrial accidents, paralysed kids, but most memorably a teenager so burned that he would die in days having a last phone conversation with his parents before they intubated him and he would not be able to talk again. That was years ago, and I can still remember the horror. Even the final episode has given me a new neurosis: a woman giving birth somehow managed to push her uterus inside out, something I really didn’t need to know was possible until after I have my future children.
Even its biggest fan would agree ER is no longer in its fullest glory, but it had a graceful enough twilight and frankly, after fifteen years, every single person who has been involved must be, and should be, incredibly proud. Extraordinarily few series manage over five years, and even a long-running quality series like The West Wing reached the end of its road after seven, not a moment too soon. ER’s special.Probably ER’s secret was always its ensemble casting. The satellites around whom the department revolved – Mark Greene, Carter, Ross, Carol, Abby Lockhart, Kerry Weaver, Archie Morris; changed over the years, but always the cast was strong. You had the nurses and desk clerks that were always there – Lydia, Haleh, Malik, Lily, Shirley, Jerry, Randy, Frank. There were deaths – Lucy, Pratt, Gant, Romano, Greene, Gallant; births – Carol, Elizabeth, Susan, Benton, Chen and Abby’s kids; and there were endless, endless loveless romances, mostly involving, in different combinations, Carter, Abby, Neela and Kovac – ER’s single recognisably happy romantic relationship was Carol/Ross. It’s had epic friendships: Greene/Ross, Carter/Benton, Romano/Corday, Susan/Greene are the most memorable ones.
Some medical students went on to be great doctors – Carter, Neela; some were disasters – Malucci, most notably. There were terrible disasters: stillborn babies, divorces, loss of limbs, drug addiction; but there was time for basketball in the ambulance bay, many practical jokes, parties in the lounge and chilling in Doc Magoo’s (before it burned down). You didn’t bond with every character, you didn’t need to. You don’t like Cleo, or Pratt, or Abby? No problem, there are about twenty other characters you can still care about. Added to which, people came and went with such frequency that invariably the person you hated would be out the door in two years. The ensemble meant ER beautifully manufactured a world into which you could slip every week, where you knew the people and the score.
Over the years ER has given television far more than just George Clooney to ogle (personally, I always did and still do find Noah Wyle more swoonsome, but appreciate most of womankind see this differently). It pretty much invented smart television that didn’t spell everything out for you, rapid-fire, jargon-filled dialogue, epic Stedicam action, multi-strand episodes with resolutions which were sometimes unsatisfying, sometimes never known. ER didn’t treat the viewer like they were stupid, it threw you in and whether you kept up or not was entirely up to you. The West Wing couldn’t have happened without ER, The Wire couldn’t have happened without ER. On a significantly less important scale, I wouldn’t be in television without ER, and I’m sure that applies to others too.
Aged 16, sitting next to my mother, both of us sobbing our hearts out, as Lucy expired (thereby entering my TV Hall of Fame as Lucy/Carter became one of the Great Television Couples That Never Were), it was a demonstration of the power episodic television has, which feature films cannot hope to challenge. I’ve never understood how you can really care or root for people you’ve only known for two hours. But inviting characters into your living room for an hour every week for years – now that’s wielding emotional power, for laughs and for tears alike. We’ve gone to that hospital weekly for fifteen years! Carter has effectively lived his adult life on our television screens: he started as an adorable, clueless med student in his early twenties and matured through personal and professional disasters on an almost operatic scale to emerge a mostly adorable, hardened Attending in his mid- thirties, but still recognisably the kid who once couldn’t put in an IV. Watching him realise his unborn baby was dead, and supporting his wife giving birth to it was totally devastating. It was only right he didn’t get a tied-up ending. Carter was as in flux as the series, no one would have believed an ending for him, happy or sad. He’d become too real to have an ending – he was irritating, smug and self-righteous towards the time he left the regular cast, but dammit, he was Carter. He was our smug, self-righteous irritant.
That’s why I love television, and that’s why I work in it. Even when it’s all rubbish and horrible and you want to die and you’re about eighty- three pages behind schedule at ten in the morning, or your director is freaking out, or it’s raining, or you’re losing light (or chasing dawn) or the stock is damaged: that’s the thing you know you’re working for. Not everyone saves lives; in the big scheme of things most peoples’ jobs aren’t heroic. TV most certainly isn’t. But it’s fun and it’s satisfying, not just for the people who make it, but hopefully the viewers too. It’s about the adrenaline, not BAFTA.
In fifteen years, ER has had its lows: After Season 6, it became noticeably darker and not, I think, for the best. With Ross’ easy charm and good humoured bantering gone, and Carter never the same after the stabbing (a shame, since Noah Wyle has sensational comic timing – who can forget him finding a snake in a cupboard?), much of the comedy that characterised the early years went missing, never to be seen again. After about Season 10, it had become almost a different show altogether – far more soapy, with beautiful young people as all the main characters and more and more concentration on the disasters ER characters routinely made of their love lives. Other lowlights: Romano’s ridiculous death, Greene and Corday’s deeply unconvincing romance, Carter’s mysterious inability to summon up any sort of sexual tension with anyone apart from Lucy, Abby’s endless misery, all of Pratt and Sam, most of Chen, Weaver’s personality transplant, Kovac’s crashingly dull struggle with his demons. Oh, yeah. There have been major blunders.
But so what? Fifteen years. The level of writing, acting and directing has never really dropped substantially for long. It’s not been anywhere near as good as once it was – but then once it was so good, that even bad ER is better than most other things. I still kind of feel that they’ve just turned off the cameras, and County General is still running somewhere, albeit staffed by whiney, nymphomaniac incompetents.
It’s sad that ER, which didn’t just lead the field but effectively invented it, has lost viewers to such processed, formulaic and vacuous shit as Grey’s Anatomy and House. ER, as each departing old-timer on the show traditionally exhorted the one left behind, set the tone. But everything has a shelf-life. TV should thank God for ER. I thank God for ER, and bid all involved, real and fictional, adieu and fair sailing.
