Well, then. I told you I had writer’s block, didn’t I? I’m going to try a new method here on this blog, not that anyone really reads it, so be patient with me. And if you like it, please say so. It’s always nice to be told you’re on the right track.
Tonight is the first time in… oh, I don’t know, 10 years, maybe longer, that I’ve watched a new episode of ER. Lots of re-runs, but in the best years I was too young and by the time I was old enough to be watching it on the nights it aired, everyone I really cared about was gone and as cute and awesome as Noah Wylie is, Carter was kind of a whiny bitch. What? It’s true, and you know it.
But there was a heyday, wasn’t there? There was a time when I wasn’t ashamed to watch ER, and there was a time far more recently that I reveled in the pure golden drama that was the first five seasons of ER. The endless steadi-cam shots, the medical jargon that rolled of seeminlgy super-human tongues, the pounding tension that a medical drama, when written, acted, and shot correctly, doesn’t even have to try for because, really, what is more terrifying for all of us than to watch someone die.. and imagine ourselves in their place?
The casting, in this case, was the key, I think. Anthony Edwards (Dr. Greene) looked just like my pediatrician. It was uncanny, up to my doctor’s nasal endowments (something Edwards, sadly, lacks), how much they looked and sounded the same. Eriq LaSalle, the cold, gruff, over-achieving surgeon-with-a-heart-of-gold-but-don’t-tell-anyone-or-he’ll-cut-you Dr. Peter Benton, and his amazing storyline about having a deaf son. Anyone who’s watched ER at all will tell you, of course, that half the fun of watching Dr. Benton was watching him lose his mind over Dr. Carter, brilliantly played by Noah Wylie as equal parts loving wealthy buffoon and whip-smart underestimated doctor. There was Julianna Margulies who, now that I think about it, seemed to fall off the face of the earth after her stint playing Carol Hathaway, your archetypical nurse to great acclaim. And, of course, there was her former-ex, one time-paramour, current husband/father of her kids, Doug Ross.
Yup. That Doug Ross. If you’re really old school, you’ll remember this Doug Ross:
Oh, Clooney. Or should I say Doug? I remember you. I remember staring at you saving a child’s life in an overflowing river during the hardest downpour Chicago had ever seen, while wearing a tux. (We should note, here, that ER figured out putting Clooney in a tux was a GREAT idea, like, 10 years before anyone thought of remaking Ocean’s 11.) I remember a lot of things, but I’m really distracted right now because you’re on TV again.
It’s so surreal to be watching Dr. Benton watching Dr. Carter get a kidney transplant, especially since said kidney was acquired from a hospital in Seattle, Washington, and specifically from a now-head-of-transplant-services Hathaway and Dr. Ross. Actually, it’s a little bit like watching an episode of a show that was once great and which you once loved while, every ten minutes, someone throws a glass of ice water in your face (which is really a fancy metaphor for watching the current cast follow their current plotlines — it’s distracting and annoying and I wish it would stop).
[Ok, this is a total aside -- directly the fault of one of those glasses of icewater, by the way -- but don't you usually have to keep organ transplant recipients in sterile rooms because they have to take hardcore immunosuppressants in order to keep the recipient from rejecting the organ? Now, see what you did there ER? You spent 6 seasons keeping me hopelessly addicted to you, which then led to a lifelong love of well-write, sometimes snarky medical shows, so now I know things like how seeing a fresh-out-of-surgery transplant recipient recovering in a normal recovery room with other people sharing their space is utterly ridiculous. I'm hereby naming this the ER Paradox, in which a good television show ruins itself by being a good television show for a while before it eventually -- after staying for too long -- gets lazy with its writing and makes mistakes disproved by itself several seasons earlier.]
[OHMYGOD DOUG ROSS IS IN BED AND SHIRTLESS AND I MIGHT AS WELL BE 14 AGAIN FOR ALL I'M WORTH.]
[And, yes, any ER episode ending with Doug Ross being hot.]
[I have totally lost control of this post because of George Clooney and the surrealness that was the first episode of ER I have watched, new, in 10 years. I think I might break out the DVDs.]
