ER turns 25: The groundbreaking NBC medical drama paved the way for Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, The Wire and The Sopranos

The Guardian

ER premiered on NBC 25 years ago today, on Sept. 19, 1994 -- three days before the launch of Friends. As Stuart Heritage points out, ER -- which ran for 15 seasons between 1994 and 2009 -- was and still is an incredible show. "The overwhelming majority of shows from the past 25 years would be dramatically different if it wasn’t for ER," says Heritage. "The murmured dialogue of The Sopranos and The Wire. The dramatic surge of Breaking Bad. The sheer spectacle of Game of Thrones. The breathless professional jargon of Line of Duty. All of them, in one way or another, owe a debt of thanks to ER. Of course, this might not be entirely evident when you first watch it. Stumble across the wrong episode and you might be bewildered by its sentimentality, or the ridiculous matinee-idol looks of its cast. But this is to be expected. Like other shows that were groundbreaking at the time, the wider culture has subsequently absorbed what made ER so great and spread it wide across everything it could. There are elements of ER in almost every TV program you’ve watched in the last 20 years. If you really want to experience the about-turn that ER represented, perhaps it’s best to spend the next 15 years of your life watching TV shows that were made before 1994. Take something like St Elsewhere, which ran for six years in the mid-1980s and was almost entirely made up of long, unbroken scenes where doctors wandered around aimlessly having long meandering conversations. For years, almost since the invention of the form, this is what television looked like. Then came ER. The first episode arrived like a hammer attack. A building collapses within the first four minutes, sending the cast into a frenzy of quick-fire medical jargon as a jittery percussive score kicks in. Stretchers flood into the hospital. We see the walls and ceiling of the hospital from the viewpoint of a wheeled-in patient. Teams of doctors attend to multiple people, communicating in long streams of deep-cut hospital terminology, punctuated by short reassurances. It’s a whirling, breathless sequence that leaves both the camera and the audience racing to keep up. When it finally comes to an end, shaking with tears after seven or eight minutes, everything else on television felt it came from another planet. Better yet, despite its influence, ER holds up incredibly well today."

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• ER was Prestige TV before the term existed: "Long before 'prestige drama' was a thing, ER had all the qualities of one," says Alan Siegel. "It was created by one of the world’s most popular authors (Michael Crichton), shepherded by Hollywood’s most powerful director (Steven Spielberg), and bolstered by a diverse cast filled with stars, up-and-comers, and a future Academy Award–winning leading man. The series featured complex characters and through its story lines boldly tackled dozens of issues of the day, including racism, AIDS, substance use disorders, and domestic violence. Its influence can still be seen in the hundreds of uncompromising hour-long shows that have followed."
• ER casting director John Levey recalls finding George Clooney, Noah Wyle, Julianna Margulies, Anthony Edwards, Eriq La Salle and Sherry Stringfield for the pilot
• 25 shocking secrets about ER revealed
• From George Clooney to Julianna Margulies: Who are ER's 10 best cast members?