who was gatekeeping 'ER' from me?: notes from watching 60 episodes in 14 days
23-year-old woman discovers 'ER'!!! - 4 thoughts on the state of streaming television and how to stay sane (after you've finished 'The Pitt')
I’m no stranger to a binge-watch. In fact, I schedule them in. After Episode 13 of Max’s The Pitt aired a few weeks ago, it went from a mere visitor in my Twitter feed to an inescapable mainstay. I promptly cleared my weekend to catch up and avoid spoilers (and to see what all these longing looks between medical professionals were about.)1
The Pitt is an easy sell: 15 episodes. 15 hours. 1 shift. It also has no score, just straight, juicy, medical Drama. That Sunday, as I inched closer and closer to getting caught up for the second-to-last Pitt Thursday, I started to get nervous. The kind of nervous where you’re having a great time on a night out, but you know the club is closing in 30 minutes. I needed my afters—a television equivalent to keep my blood pumping—and find those afters I did!
ER, which aired its first episode in 1994 and its last in 2009, is somehow an even simpler pitch than The Pitt, so I’ll jazz it up a bit. 90% of ER takes place in a hospital, and it follows an ensemble of strangely attractive doctors, nurses, and med students. ER is just as much a workplace drama as it is a medical drama, the team saving lives by taking on all the rich and varied emergencies that the heart of Chicago has to offer.
Nearly 3 weeks ago, I began the show on a lazy Sunday afternoon to get some more innocent looks at Noah Wyle (The Pitt’s Dr. Robby and ER’s Dr. Carter). Since then, I haven’t gone a single day without spending at least a few hours at County General Hospital. I’m clocking shifts! I’ve entered a kind of fugue state, really. This is Olympic-level television watching with no end in sight (Did I mention there are 15 seasons?!).
Even though I wrote a similarly impassioned essay about ABC’s Dr. Odyssey last fall, I’ve never much considered myself the kind of person who loves a medical drama. While a few seasons of Grey’s Anatomy were a blip on my radar back in high school, something about it failed to stick or make me understand the genre. No shade to Shonda, but how long can you watch one white woman suffer?
The beauty of ER is that I can’t imagine who it isn’t for. It’s timeless, pitch-perfect, and surprisingly politically engaged. It checks all my boxes for what I crave from any show, so why have I never thought to watch it before?
To answer this question, I present 4 key takeaways from the now 762 episodes of this show I’ve devoured. ER has my wheels turning about the modern television landscape, especially as someone who came of age as a TV-watcher during the 2010s streaming era.
1) the 22-episode season is all it’s cracked up to be.
Forgive me for sounding very young, but hear me out: We’ve heard this refrain over and over again in the last 5 years. The people yearn for longer seasons, but if your TV diet consists of Netflix or Hulu and you enjoy shows where characters have iPhones, you’re out of luck if you want anything longer than 10 episodes. It’s strange to be in an era where television is constantly delightful and disappointing. However, on the whole, we still have an embarrassment of riches in terms of contemporary, quality television.
Watching ER, I’ve taken a television vacation of sorts, now accustomed to the rhythms and beats of a “drawn-out” season. While watching, I actually feel some presence because I’m not worried about how the writers are going to stick the landing in 3 more episodes. I’m also not worried I’ll get attached to the characters, the season will end mid-arcs, and then I’ll never see them again.
4 Christmas episodes, 3 sizzling finales, and about 10 appendectomies in, and I’ve hit my stride ER, something I’ll never be able to say about mini-series turned multi-series dragged out over several years.
I struggle to endorse a current-day equivalent of the 22-episode season order. Maybe I’m just painfully aware that we don’t have the entertainment infrastructure or pop cultural bandwidth for it anymore…
2) maybe rediscovery is part of the equation for a good television diet.
Reckoning with the fact that we have 24/7 non-stop access to the best works film and television have to offer is simply not an issue people had 10, 20, 30 years ago!
I envy the 90s television viewer in a way. There was no one telling them their time could be better spent revisiting the classics. Even if there was a cultural awareness of the great TV of the past, it wasn’t easy or expected to seek it out and be familiar. The growing sensation that your eyeballs could be witnessing the peaks of television at all times is the modern problem for the avid viewer.
My answer? Modern problems require modern solutions: Instead of chasing the high of knowing you’re watching the show of the year or complaining about nothing good being on, I encourage you to rediscover what’s already there. ER isn’t the only show of its kind: 1) excellent 2) not going anywhere.3 Use the older stuff to fill out your diet and reset your tastes, so when something new comes along, you’ll really know when its worth your time.
3) some shows actually have it all, and that’s due to a strong ensemble.
Before settling into the warm embrace of George Clooney’s eyes for the past few weeks, my TV watching was at its dirt-baggiest. By that I mean, 5 to 6 shows on rotation: some week-to-week, some older stuff I needed to catch up on, or rewatches where I was chasing some sort of high from when I was 19.
Due to the nature of streaming and my compulsive need to satisfy my every television whim,4 my watching has been an emotional piecemeal. Severance for the mystery and visual stimulation. The White Lotus for the sex, mess, and death. A Scandal rewatch because there aren’t enough Black female leads to project onto right now.
Streaming television shows seem to have an awareness that you’re watching something else, so they just give you a piece of what you’re looking for. What has me so caught up in ER is that I feel like I’m watching every kind of show. Dr. Carter and his angsty mid-twenties coming-of-age drama. Doug and Carol giving the slowest of slow burns and making me pause to breathe. The politics of managing a hospital in conflict with Dr. Benton navigating being the sole Black man in surgical residency. The nurses even serve some slapstick comedy. There’s death and blood and births, and being in the titular Emergency Room is never not exciting until you get the rare and beautiful moments outside of it. There’s always someone at their peak and someone at rock bottom. Yes, even on Christmas.
4) waiting for a resurgence pays off.
Re: what I was saying in #2: Maybe the way to deal with this backlog of epic television isn’t actually to seek it out, but to wait for it to come to you.
The Pitt is obviously a spiritual successor to ER. The shows share the same DNA in a few of their actors and creators, but I still love that The Pitt stands alone as its own IP.5 Now that we’re discussing a new, popular medical drama, It’s interesting to hear critics and OG fans of ER (like my mom) share fond memories of and reverence for a time when it was on the air.
As long as TV is produced at its current pace and volume, I’m trying to accept that great stuff will keep falling through the cracks—until it doesn’t. The nice thing is on some random Sunday, what’s new on your screen will send you back in time to something older. You’ll be given a smooth on-ramp (The Pitt) to something you’ll like just as much if not more (ER), and you won’t be the only one!
One more reason I’m loving my first watch of ER is having communities of people online watching it too. It’s supremely silly and fun to see discourse about plotlines that resolved before I was born, or to see edits about characters who use answering machines.
Now, to address my question: Who was gatekeeping ER from me?
The short answer: Gen X.
The longer answer: Gen X and elder millennials. Additionally, our fractured pop cultural moment where 22 episodes of a simple premise cannot compete with the constant churn of new streaming shows. Currently, TV is always on the cutting edge—for better (Adolescence) or for worse (Suits LA), and it takes a lot of time and energy to sort out what’s what.
Who knows if I’ll ever make it to Season 15 of ER, but since I still haven’t bothered to watch the season finale of The White Lotus, I find The Studio extremely irritating, and HBO Sundays are based on a video game, this show is where my priorities lie.
my friend who’s on episode 1 asked if any of the characters would end up fucking, and i told her “yes, with their eyes”
this figure has increased since i scheduled this post
blah blah the need for physical media blah blah
chicken and egg situation
IP meaning intellectual property. I’m sure Max is glad this worked out too - The Pitt is renewed for a Season 2 coming next January!
I’m so thrilled to read your perspective on this! The only correction I would offer (that you would have no reasonable way of knowing) is that we did in fact in the late 90s and early 2000s have access to really good TV from previous eras thanks to syndication. TV networks would pay for that content at a much cheaper rate, and since we had limited options on what to watch, it was common to catch series from the 60s, 70s and 80s during the day so you did in fact learn a lot.
clocked into ER af