Post by jag11 on Apr 2, 2009 6:51:22 GMT -5
Yahoo and Netscape first surfaced in 1994. That was the year Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa, the World Economic Forum ranked the United States as the world’s most competitive economy, and “ER” made its debut on NBC.
Its intense, exhilarating look at an overburdened Chicago emergency room instantly turned “ER” into a cultural milestone. Now the fictional County General Hospital is at long last closing its doors after a 15-year run. For all the NBC hype, Thursday’s retrospective of clips and a two-hour finale is a little like a postscript.
Almost all long-running hit shows indulge in a sentimental victory lap. “ER” has devoted almost this entire season to its dolorous valedictory, underscored by cameo reappearances by the likes of George Clooney and Noah Wyle. Most strikingly, however, the final episodes served up a parable of anxiety — not the viewers’ sense of loss, but the creators’ fears of oblivion.
This medical drama that won 22 Emmy Awards and at its height commanded audiences 30 million strong hasn’t received an Emmy since 2005 and is outshone in the ratings by newer hospital dramas like “House” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”
Talented, powerful doctors leave the E.R. for cushier jobs and are quickly replaced. A onetime wunderkind returns, and the new interns and residents don’t know him or trust his skills, which seem rusty. The doctor who decades earlier invented the modern emergency room is long forgotten — even he, struck by senile dementia, cannot remember his own name and accomplishments.
The show’s executive producers include John Wells, who was also an executive producer of “The West Wing,” and few have any reason to worry about their futures. But all kinds of endings can be traumatic, whether it’s a student’s graduating from college, a family’s moving to a new house or a longtime employee’s preparing to retire: did any of it matter, and will anyone remember?
And more than any other, an episode about change, titled “A Long, Strange Trip,” seemed to signal the writers’ and producers’ underlying distress (and also, perhaps, grief: Michael Crichton, the novelist who wrote the original “ER” script in 1974, died last year).
In an early scene workers cart off dozens of boxes, old medical files consigned to what one doctor describes as “remote storage.” (“ER” is in reruns on TNT.)
An elderly man is found staggering without a wallet or a memory; only a County retirement watch hints at his identity. The old man seems insentient, but he has recurring black-and-white flashbacks to 1968, when nurses wore white stockings and crisp caps, and police cars, as well as ambulances, ferried patients to the hospital.
Next to him, doctors struggle to save a woman who they have determined has terminal cancer. Disturbed but unable to speak, the old man feebly grabs a yellow legal pad and scratches on it “TB.” (Fittingly, the episode is laced with strains from “La Bohème.”) It turns out that he is right, that she has tuberculosis, and that the brilliant chief of surgery was wrong.
The stranger, described by one medical worker as a “demented grandpa,” turns out to be Dr. Oliver Kostin, an innovator who in 1968 created County’s first modern emergency services unit. “You’re all here because of this guy,” David Morgenstern (William H. Macy), a former County chief of surgery and Kostin protégé, tells the ER staff.
The episode ends with the main characters respectfully gathered around Kostin as he is tenderly unhooked from machines and allowed to die in dignity.
And so “ER” will end, with dignity and esteem. But so did “St. Elsewhere” and “Chicago Hope,” shows that are now footnotes in television history. Medical shows thrive on matters of life and death; the final season of “ER” has been preoccupied with recognition.
And that could be why a documentary crew showed up at the E.R. to interview doctors and nurses about their busy lives — and most proved too busy saving lives to record their own adequately.
The episode that chronicles the departure of Neela (Parminder Nagra) included many tearful moments, like a tender airport adieu with her former boyfriend, Simon (David Lyons). But the emotional high point came when Neela is taken down to the basement to place her locker tag on the hospital’s wall of honor. Some of the tags belong to colleagues who have died, but most have merely moved on. As Neela pays her respects, elegiac music plays in the background — the kind suited to a ceremony at the Vietnam Memorial or Pointe du Hoc.
Mr. Clooney’s much-heralded return as Dr. Doug Ross was anticlimactic: Dr. Ross, still handsome and winning, is still happily married to his broody old flame, Nurse Carol Hathaway (Julianna Margulies). Both stars were eclipsed by a guest appearance by Susan Sarandon, who stole every scene as the grief-wracked grandmother of a boy killed in a traffic accident.
The reappearance of Mr. Wyle as Dr. John Carter, on the other hand, was stretched into a multi-episode arc that chronicled the pain of obscurity. His need for a kidney transplant was nothing compared with the shock of returning to an emergency room where nobody knew his name.
All that angst, conscious and unconscious, made for a bracing season. Just as TB patients develop rosy cheeks in the final stages, “ER” at the end recovered the vigor and urgency of its prime.