A Note About "E.R."
Fri., April 3, 01:05 PM
I know that a lot of people are saddened by the end of the popular show “E.R.” after fifteen years. I stopped watching it a few years after it started, mostly because so many of my favorite characters left the show and were replaced by characters I didn’t care for. (I never could warm up to Noah Wyle’s character.)
Though I did watch “E.R.,” my favorite show that season was “Chicago Hope.” It starred Mandy Patinkin and Adam Arkin, among others; I watched it until a despicable character portrayed by Thomas Gibson became a major player. (For years I avoided anything with Gibson, but he does well in “Criminal Minds,” which also starred Patinkin for a while.)
One of my favorite sequences involved a married couple who had to go out on a Thursday night because the husband considered it an emergency. “You owe me,” says the wife, “I’m missing ‘E.R.’”
They didn’t do that kind of joking on “E.R.,” which was a shame because they had one tailor-made. Some ten years before “E.R.,” there was a simpler little show called “E/R.” It starred Elliot Gould as the main emergency services doctor, with Conchata Ferrell (you might recognize her from “Two and a Half Men”) as the head nurse. There was a young fellow called Ace, who was sometimes a janitor and sometimes an assistant when another pair of hands was needed. Ace was played by a kid named George Clooney. Wouldn’t it have been cute to have either Gould or Ferrell turn up on “E.R” and say, “Congratulations, Ace, looks like you made it”?
Too late now, of course. Meanwhile, I seem to have lost my taste for medical shows anyhow — even “House.” I seem to have taken a turn for forensics.
