'ER' Finally Checking Out After 15 Memorable Seasons
Pioneering doctor drama "ER" ends 15 season, star-studded run this Thursday.
March 29, 2009 — -- "Boom. Boom. Blanket. Boom."
Noah Wyle talks himself through each step as he walks deliberately across the "ER" trauma room set, from fetal monitor to glove dispenser and back to the gurney where his Dr. John Carter will help an intern deliver twins.
"It's a swaddle, right?" he asks, checking each move with medical technical adviser Jon Fong, M.D. "Baby, point, wrap, wrap, bundle."
Wyle has done this ballet — the Trauma 2 waltz — hundreds of times since NBC's groundbreaking medical drama premiered in 1994. But this is his last dance, one of a cascade of lasts for cast and crew that will be part of "ER's" two-hour series finale (Thursday, 9 ET/PT, after a retrospective at 8).
"My final trauma scene," says Wyle, one of many ex-regulars to return for goodbyes. "I've been on the gurneys as a patient, over the gurneys as a doctor, done a lot of chest compressions, thoracotomies and intubations, sewn a lot of sutures and snapped on a lot of latex gloves."
The scene, which not surprisingly has complications, completes the circle at Chicago's County General Hospital for the now-veteran Carter, who assisted on a delivery as a medical student in the long-ago premiere.
For the finale trauma scene, Wyle is one of a dozen people, including original nurse Yvette Freeman, navigating the small green room in the signature choreography that helped make "ER" one of TV's last super-hits and NBC its dominant network.
During "ER's" early years, it averaged more than 30 million viewers as TV's No. 1 show — peaking at 48 million for a 1995 episode — and spawned magazine covers, patient inquiries to doctors, Emmys (to date, a record 122 nominations) and an Oscar-winning movie career for George Clooney.
"It brought back hour dramas in a time where the sitcom was king," says executive producer Christopher Chulack, who says "ER" is leaving at the right time.
What was then an unusual style — constantly moving Steadicam shots, quick cuts, medical talk and disconnected dialogue — made NBC executives wary until it enthralled viewers, he says. "You felt you were a fly on the wall every Thursday night."
Related Stories
ABC News Live