ER won’t be replaced anytime soon as the longest running primetime medical drama, as the strongest contender to the title, House, has just announced its final season, which will leave ER as the reigning champ for years to come. Even though the last six years may have turned off some of its original fans, the final season almost marks a return to form in its construction of complex character-driven stories, but a few cheap ploys and a rushed finale-arc don’t make it entirely spotless. ER can boast one thing that many recent shows can’t though: its finale’s closing moment is pitch-perfect.
I can’t decide whether or not I should chastise or praise the writers of ER’s fifteenth and final season for writing in virtually every veteran of the show they could get their hands on under the flimsy banner of an organ transplant story and a fundraiser. To their credit they didn’t go the traditionally cheesy route of doing a single, big reunion retrospective episode, but they came about as close to that as possible without actually doing it. It wouldn’t be so bad, except it seems as placatory to the fans as it is perfunctory towards the show’s legacy of spinning a compelling character-based medical yarn. First of all, the fans who’ve mourned the show’s direction since the departure of its stronger cast members aren’t just going to forgive six years of weaker seasons, and if anything the cheap ploy of bringing them back under such a weak premise is indicative of where the show has gone wrong.
ER, despite being a show about life-saving medicine in an overcrowded hospital, used to take its time developing stories, and letting it unfold in as much time as is needed. In this last season, it waited until the last 6 episodes and then crammed in a story line that saw the shoehorned return of Carter (Noah Wyle), Dr. Ross (George Clooney), Nurse Hathaway (Julianna Margulies), Dr. Benton (Eriq La Salle), Dr. Corday (Alex Kingston), Dr. Susan Lewis (Sherry Stringfield), desk jockey Jerry (Abraham Benrubi), and even Dr. Greene (Anthony Edwards) and Dr. Morgenstern (William H. Macy) via flashbacks that are actually more graceful as they serve a deeper purpose. The issue here being, why wait until the final season to do all this? Up until the last season alumni seldom visited, and if they did they were usually the recent graduates, not the seasoned vets. Bringing them all back so suddenly feels rushed and creates a lot of questions. If so many of these doctors were so close by (supposedly), why are they just now showing up again?
Writing off Dr. Greene through cancer was the show’s most effective and emotionally charged death of any character in the show’s history, and so bringing him back is a delicate process. Here we saw him as a piece of revisionist history to introduce the new ER showrunner Dr. Banfield (Angela Bassett) and her traumatic family history. In the case of Dr. Morgenstern, the return was as the caretaker of a patient with a deep connection to the ER. Obviously it’s hard to get an A-Lister like George Clooney to return for an episode, but if you’re going to get him scheduled in for an episode, make the best of it and don’t let it get lost in a cluttered reunion.
In defense of this season, it is easily the strongest since Carter’s departure as the lead (even if his protagonist arc paled in comparison to Dr. Greene’s). Finally, Dr. Morris (Scott Grimes), Dr. Rasgotra (Parminder Nagra), Dr. Gates (John Stamos), Dr. Brenner (David Lyons), and Nurse Taggart (Linda Cardellini) finally feel like fully fleshed out characters and that they’re truly driving the show. This doesn’t mean the writers have a better sense of how to grow all of them as Taggart is still trapped in her pattern of running away from every serious relationship which is what made her arc with Dr. Kovac (Goran Visnjic) so tiring. However Drs. Morris and Rosgotra finally take steps in the right direction, the former as a doctor ready to move on and the latter as someone to be taken seriously both in and out of the hospital.
Perhaps the most important victory for the final season is that the writers gave the show an elegant send-off in its final moments by doing nothing special. That’s right. The writers stuck to the show’s series-long theme of “just another day”, ending a strong season with a moment that perfectly reflected its soul: the ER doctors marching into the ambulance bay to receive the victims of an explosion. Perfect.
DVD Bonus Features
One season set release after another, all Warner Brothers has given the loyal fans of ER as extras have been the deleted scenes labeled as “Outpatient Outtakes”. Appropriately, the final season set gives the fans something else to devour in the form of a 41-minute retrospective, “Previously on ER” looking back at all of the season’s signature moments and the characters that made them great. For fans it’s a great nod to one of the best medical dramas to grace television, but is it enough as the sole additional featurette for a series cap? I would argue no, and would have liked to see a featurette on Michael Crichton, acclaimed author and the show’s creator, who died mid-season.
"ER: The Complete Fifteenth Season" is on sale July 12, 2011 and is not rated. Drama. Directed by Andrew Bernstein, Christopher Chulack, Paul McCrane, Stephen Cragg, David Zabel, Rod Holcomb. Written by Joe Sachs, Lisa Zwerling, David Zabel, Virgil Williams, Karen Maser. Starring Abraham Benrubi, Angela Bassett, David Lyons, John Stamos, Linda Cardellini, Parminder Nagra, Scott Grimes.
