You had to actively be a participant to get the most out of it. You couldn’t just watch ER the old way, letting it flop across your eyes like wallpaper. They’re not just technically impressive but, in their refusal to lead viewers by the hand, they laid the seeds for almost every show you love today. Although it would eventually succumb to a comfortable soapiness, the propulsive set-pieces are still remarkably sophisticated. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library/Alamyīetter yet, despite its influence, ER holds up incredibly well today. Nobody was bigger than the show … Julianna Margulies and George Clooney in ER. For years, almost since the invention of the form, this is what television looked like. Take something like St Elsewhere, which ran for six years in the mid-1980s and was almost entirely made up of long, unbroken scenes where doctors wandered around aimlessly having long meandering conversations. If you really want to experience the about-turn that ER represented, perhaps it’s best to spend the next 15 years of your life watching TV shows that were made before 1994.
There are elements of ER in almost every TV programme you’ve watched in the last 20 years. Like other shows that were groundbreaking at the time, the wider culture has subsequently absorbed what made ER so great and spread it wide across everything it could. Stumble across the wrong episode and you might be bewildered by its sentimentality, or the ridiculous matinee-idol looks of its cast. Of course, this might not be entirely evident when you first watch it. All of them, in one way or another, owe a debt of thanks to ER.
#ER TV SERIES PROFESSIONAL#
The breathless professional jargon of Line of Duty. The murmured dialogue of The Sopranos and The Wire. The overwhelming majority of shows from the past 25 years would be dramatically different if it wasn’t for ER.
#ER TV SERIES SERIES#
And this means you should all drop whatever you’re doing now and dedicate the next 331 hours of your life to reminding yourself what an incredible series it was.Īnd it was.
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