But I certainly don't agree on Morris, which just smacks of incompetent storytelling to me. The ER has had its "villains" in the past (Kerry Weaver, Robert Romano), but those characters were (and, in the case of Kerry, since she's still alive, still are) well-rounded. We know they're good doctors; we know something of their lives and struggles; they're not just foils for comic relief or an all-purpose annoyance factor for the other characters. Morris has never been depicted as competent at anything (in fact, in earlier seasons he has both quit med school and been caught sneaking a puff on a joint on the job -- good thing for him, I suppose, that a helicopter dropped on Romano's head before he could fire Morris when that one happened), and yet, now we're expected to believe that he's suddenly managed to uncover enough competence to impress people who already know that he sucks enough to promote him to Chief Resident. I'm sorry, but that's just bad storytelling. It violates the cardinal rule, "Show, don't tell". Morris is nothing more than a cartoon character.
I think that Neela vaccilates between interesting and, well, not. She's all over the map. One episode, she's lecturing one of her other fellow med students about bedside manner; next episode, she's demonstrating no bedside manner whatsoever. And I don't find Sam the nurse interesting in the slightest degree. She's been dragging the exact same set of problems around with her since her character first walked onto the set. There's no growth there, no nothing -- just the same kind of vaccilating between being warm and incredibly cold depending on the whim of the writers on that particular day. John cites these characters for their consistency, but I don't see that at all; sometimes they seem to have grown, other times they seem to have not grown at all; sometimes, in the case of Sam, they seem to have regressed.
John also says that the show can remain fresh, theoretically, because the roster of potential medical problems for the ER to face can never be exhausted. Well, maybe not -- but the way they can be treated within the constraints of a 44-minute TV show certainly can be exhausted. The med stuff seems to play out roughly the same way, each time out: the bay doors crash open, in comes the gurney with the EMTs rattling off lots of jargon, then into a trauma room where pulse ox is taken and pints of O-neg are strung up and so on. X-rays are fretted over. Maybe a student can't quite figure it out, so an attending asks leading questions. Maybe the student can answer them (indicating their growing confidence), or maybe they can't (indicating their still-lacking confidence). Maybe a family member walks in, or maybe the patient freaks out and yanks out the IV and bleeds all over the place, or maybe if it's a multiple trauma a family member's on the exam table in the next room over and sees their loved one in Trauma One and starts shrieking their name. Maybe a surgical consult is taken, or maybe the patient goes into defib. Maybe the arrogant doc gets the patient's heart beating again, or maybe the doc -- who could be anyone -- becomes so emotionally invested that they continue CPR compressions for a period long past when braindeath has occurred. And then someone says softly, "Luka..." or "Pratt..." or "Abby..." and they stop compressions, sigh, give the time of death and then angrily strip off their latex gloves. The medical portions of the show are almost as dependent upon formula as Law and Order. So, at this point, for me the show has to be about characters, and they just don't hold my interest anymore.
But that is all neither here nor there. What I really disagree with in John's post is his assumption as to what's behind my current dislike of ER:
Many, Jaquandor included, took in last week's episode, which centered around a pregnancy in crisis, and immediately compared it, unfavorably, to the infamous "Dr. Greene loses a pregnant mother episode" from an early season. I'm always suspicious when you hear the refrain "it was better then." Memory has a way of coloring our experiences heavily; how many people insist that their favorite band's best work was done--how coincidentally--when they first got into them?
Echoing John, to this I say, "Feh."
First off, it's worth noting that I haven't been down on ER completely for the seven or eight years or whatever it's been since the original cast started defecting; in fact, I thought it had a brilliant episode just two short years ago. Beyond that, I thought the episode in which the ER learned of Dr. Greene's death is one of the very best the show has had, and I thought last year's two-parter with Dr. Gallant returning briefly from Iraq was good as well.
(John also lumps me in, several times, with lots of other people who are ripping on the show. I wouldn't know who those are, since it's not like I participate in any way in ER fandom, if it exists. And I certainly haven't noticed any search engine hits along the lines of "ER sucks", so maybe John could share a link or two. My comments on ER are mine alone, and certainly not meant to be any kind of "received wisdom".)
But going deeper, I find John's dismissal of my opinion as mere nostalgia rather convenient; it's as if he simply wants to disqualify in advance any belief I may hold that Drs. Ross and Greene were more interesting than the Shane West character or Dr. Morris or whomever. "Ah, that's just nostalgia," goes the refrain -- which means that the question of whether or not the show's stories really are as good as ever can be safely set aside. This is baffling to me, and I'm troubled to think of an instance where I really think that some cultural artifact was at its best at the time that I first got into it. The X-Files? Nope -- I started watching faithfully in Season Three, and I thought it was at its best in Seasons Five and Six. Millennium? Season Two. Star Trek? I watched the Original Series all the time as a kid -- but I think that Deep Space Nine was its most consistently good incarnation. I watched NYPDBlue from the series premiere until its series finale last year, and its best work came in its fourth and fifth years, when Jimmy Smits was on board and the chemistry between him and Dennis Franz had been worked out. I watched Frasier from the first year, and loved it until near its end (in fact, I stopped watching it not because I didn't like it anymore but because it was up against 24, and I faithfully watched the last half of its last season, finding it brilliant again), and I think its best work came when the writers stopped playing games with Niles and Daphne. The Simpsons? I don't know, since I haven't watched it regularly in a year either, but I think the recent work that I have watched is often very good indeed. James Bond? I first saw him in action in Moonraker, but my persistent belief is that the best Bond movie was made two years before I was born. My first Van Halen album was 1984, but my favorite album of theirs is still 5150, three years and one lead singer later. And I've never been one to cry about the lack of a Han Solo character in the Star Wars prequels. I could go on.
The problem with a show like ER is that it's clearly designed to be an "interchangeable ensemble" show, which is nothing new. ER actually replaced one such show, in LA Law, which incidentally didn't do its best stuff in the first years I watched it, either. But it fell victim to the same kind of thing that I think now afflicts ER: storytelling paralysis coupled with boring and, occasionally, just plain bad characterization. When the ER producers started bringing in new characters, some were hits (Kerry Weaver, Abby, Elizabeth Korday), others were misses (whatever that woman's name Peter Benton went off with, "Dr. Dave", Lucy Knight). They had it going pretty well again just a couple of years ago, but then I started to feel the chemistry going again, and now I think the chemistry's pretty much nonexistent in the current roster. Ultimately, I don't think John's charge of nostalgia goes anywhere. We're just left, then, with a difference of opinion: I'm bored by the show as it is now, and I am therefore changing my channel. I'm not lobbying for its cancellation or anything (my call for cancellation in the last post on the subject was meant to echo the show's recurrent theme of government budget cuts threatening County Hospital's existence), and since I think I'm quite capable of rising above any feelings of "nostalgia" I may have for the early seasons, we still have a mere difference of opinion. John thinks that the show is still great, can go on for an indeterminate number of years, and would be well-received if it premiered this year, as it is. I disagree.
Which is why this Thursday at ten he'll be watching ER, and I'll be reading a book. Who's better off? No one, really: he still has a show he likes, and I'm free of a show I don't like anymore. Sounds like we both win.
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