It’s a method of accessing the series that would have been inconceivable to the undergraduate version of myself who, back in the mid-1990s, was watching on a 14-inch portable TV with his girlfriend in manky digs.
And the acts of heroism on display, such as reckless Doug Ross (George Clooney) risking all to rescue a boy trapped in a storm drain as the rain waters rose. It felt filmic, almost mythic. Well, as much as anything can on a tiny, boxy Sony without Nicam Stereo.
But such awareness mattered not. Each winter, we’ll still watch season one’s Blizzard because nothing says Christmas like a multi-car pile-up in the snow. And every festive season, we’ll tell our now-grown-up kids just how much ER meant to us when we were their age. They’ll smile indulgently for a second or two and then go back to thinking of us as they ordinarily do. As index fingers with a banking app attached.
Because despite us merely dusting down the odd tinselly episode on an annual basis, ER is not just for Christmas. In fact, it ought to be given its due more vocally in general, especially by critics who believe the most recent golden age of TV dawned with the debut of The Sopranos in 1999.
Spool back to 1994 and the birth of ER and you’ll find the true start of what’s now categorised prestige television. Before this time, dialogue had overlapped and morals had been compromised (Hill Street Blues), there’d been tonal ambiguity and attempts to make TV as art (Twin Peaks), even depictions of doctors as burnouts rather than paragons of virtue (St Elsewhere). But ER achieved what those others didn’t in being ambitious, serious, influential but also massively popular.
ER, on the other hand, could produce such devastating hours of TV as Love’s Labor Lost (in which Greene tragically misdiagnosed a pregnant patient – a mistake that would haunt him for the rest of his career), win Emmy awards for the results and still top the Nielsen ratings. And yet it’s never really spoken of in the same glowing terms as the Breaking Bads or The Wires of this world. Why?
Perhaps its home on US network NBC rather than cable channel HBO has resulted in it now being overlooked? Did its increasingly grandiose set-piece stunts do it more harm than good (certainly, Dr Romano didn’t fare well from his two fateful encounters with helicopters)? Maybe the fact that it ended its run with a completely different regular cast to its original line-up has led to accusations that it outstayed its welcome?
“Dr Greene, you coming?” Carter asks as ambulances pull up to the bay and the cameras pan out. It’s the most beautiful piece of narrative symmetry: the shifts continue, as do the lessons, and characters are shown to matter because of what they hand down to the next generation.
ER is coming to Netflix UK on Monday 9 February 2026.
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