ER Finale Ends Series with Little Melodrama

The ER finale has been billed as a TV event for months. Prior to the ER finale, pretty much every episode has been hyped as a big event, with at least one major former star coming back. So for the actual series finale, fans would naturally expect ER to have something big planned. Either a reappearance from a final old star, another explosion or shooting, or something else big that series finales do. But instead, the ER finale was low on stunts and stunt casting.

For the entire season, ER has welcomed back old friends like Anthony Edwards, Noah Wyle, William H. Macy, Eriq LaSalle, Julianna Margulies, and of course, after months of wondering, George Clooney. In the ER finale, the major returnees were Noah Wyle’s Dr. Carter, who has already been around for most of the last few weeks, and the late Dr. Green’s daughter.

Noah Wyle was the last original doctor standing on ER, after so many of the show’s biggest stars left for bigger things, or were written off. So naturally, the final weeks of ER mainly focused on his health problems, and his subsequent new medical center, which finally opened in the finale. On the stunt casting side, Alexis Biedel joined County Hospital as an intern.

The series finale was a personal affair for ER executive producer John Wells, whose 17-year-old niece died of alcohol poisoning death in December. Wells put in a subplot in the ER finale where an alcohol poisoned teen was a patient.

Over the years, ER became less known as an Emmy-winning groundbreaking series, and more known for original cast members leaving, countless sweeps stunts, and the occasional hard-to-believe death. But for the finale, big stunts and melodrama were on short supply.

Series finales usually go one of two ways – ones that have big action and insane antics to send the series off with a bang, and ones that purposefully have little going on, in the old “life goes on” cliche.

This series finale was the definition of “life goes on” which may have lived down to the hype as a result. After all, this is a show that became better known for big action, stars and crises over the years.

More big returns and plot twists were put into the episodes leading up to the finale than the finale itself. Mainly, those audiences who left years back may have just been waiting for the show to bring Clooney and Margulies back, which it did a few weeks before the finale.

Regardless, ER is now officially done after 15 years, and after being the pioneer for medical drama shows for at least half of them. Now Grey’s Anatomy has the spotlight all to itself as the most soap opera-esq, dramatic, often very over the top medical show on television.

Sources

STLtoday- “ER finale: bloated, anticlimactic and touching” www.stltoday.com/blogzone/tube-talk/tv-review/2009/04/er-finale-bloated-anticlimactic-and-touching/

FOX News- “E.R. Finale Based on Death of Producer’s 17-Year-Old Niece” www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,512226,00.html