Perhaps because of its longevity or because its inventions became conventions or because anything with such broad appeal is likely to invite disdain from some quarters, "ER," which of course concludes tonight after 15 seasons, never seemed to be as highly regarded as, to mention a few, "The Sopranos," "Six Feet Under," "Hill Street Blues" or "St. Elsewhere." Most people I know viewed it as a formulaic medical soap opera with the requisite life-affirming uplift -- a verdict that became even more pronounced as the seasons passed and diseases, situations and character types were recycled.
MASH
Yet for those of us who kept watching it, and I have seen every episode, "ER," far from declining, actually gained a cumulative power and, more, began to purvey a vision that would surprise those who gave up the show for dead. With its interlarding of medical triumph and personal angst, "ER" may have begun as a show about salvation, in the operating room and in the doctors' own lives, but it became a show about the near impossibility of salvation -- a show less about healing than about damage. Those holiday episodes notwithstanding ("a very special 'ER' "), the show may now be the darkest, bleakest program on broadcast television and the one with the most sophisticated take on life.
The seeds for this vision were planted early. The nurses and doctors performed heroically (surprisingly few patients have been lost over the years), but from the outset they all bore their own stigmata. Many of these were physical. There was AIDS, Alzheimer's, a rape, a double amputation, death in a helicopter crash, an emergency hysterectomy, a deadly aneurysm, a knife attack that seriously hurt one doctor and killed another, and Dr. Greene's (Anthony Edwards) fatal brain tumor. In short, the patients had nothing on the people who attended them.
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