Back to County General (again)

Revisiting 'ER' Season One, plus 'Evil,' 'Time Bandits,' 'Homicide' comes to streaming, and political life imitating political art

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I use the words “Jesus,” “Michael Bay,” and “pillow”…

Welcome back, Carter?

I know that a few weeks ago, I promised that I would pick a new show to follow my late-period ER treadmill binge. I had good intentions and everything, added both Grey’s Anatomy and Black Sails to my streaming queues as, respectively, another hospital drama, and a show with a lot of action that, by many accounts, got a lot better not long after I gave up on it. But while I waited to decide on one versus the other, I decided on a whim to spend a few days looping back to the beginning of ER, since this latest binge only covered the post-Mark Greene seasons. And, wouldn’t you know it, I just. Kept. Watching ER. I swear at some point I will exercise to another TV show, but this will not be the summer for that, apparently.

At this writing, I just finished Season One, which is a pretty masterful year of TV — among the most self-assured debuts the medium has ever had, even factoring in the cable and streaming revolutions to follow. And since this is a slow-ish week for new material, and since I have this newsletter and no other place to put my thoughts on 30-year-old episodes of television, I thought I would share them with you all. (I promise I will not turn this into an ER-only newsletter, but I may not be able to resist rambling about it from time to time.)

• “Love’s Labor Lost,” where Mark Greene’s overconfidence during what appears to be a routine labor-and-delivery case leads to tragedy, remains one of the best single episodes of dramatic television ever. This time around, though, it was as hard to watch for what I knew was coming after the episode as what happened in it. For most of the season, Mark is presented as the platonic ideal of an ER doctor: quick-thinking, level-headed, good with both patients and colleagues, an all-around Fun Boss. And pretty much from this episode on, he becomes an unrelenting vortex of misery. That’s the danger of having an actor as gifted as Anthony Edwards, and an episode as potent as this: once you see how great your star is at playing abject misery, it becomes hard to resist going back to that well again and again and again. (See also Sipowicz on NYPD Blue, Tommy Gavin on Rescue Me, every post-Mad Men role for Elizabeth Moss, among others.)

• “Love’s Labor Lost” is directed by Mimi Leder, who gets the lion’s share of the credit for the action movie-style filmmaking of the ER trauma sequences. (Rod Holcomb directed the pilot, and Leder the first regular episode; the difference in intensity is striking, even though the pilot is incredible.) She was able to use the success as a launchpad for a feature directing career, first reteaming with George Clooney for The Peacemaker, then making Deep Impact, the better of 1998’s two movies about astronauts trying to prevent a celestial body from crashing into Earth. Her third movie, the disastrous Pay It Forward, landed her in Movie Jail for nearly two decades, though she continued to do great work on the small screen, most notably as the chief director for most of the run of The Leftovers. It’s interesting to compare her episodes to the one episode that was stunt-directed by Quentin Tarantino, at the height of his Pulp Fiction fame. Tarantino works in various signatures of his movies (characters walking slowly in sunglasses, barefoot women, insert shots of knives and other potential weapons), but doesn’t quite have a handle on the trauma scenes in the way that Leder and some of the other regular ER directors did. (He would do better years later directing an episode of CSI.) Mostly, I just wanted to sing Mimi Leder’s praises again. She’s fantastic.

• While ER for the most part arrived fully formed, there’s still a fair amount of trial-and-error in these early days for the series. Peter Benton is much more outgoing, even wisecracking, in the first half of the season than the buttoned-down taskmaster he became. Doug Ross periodically mentions having a son, and in one episode acknowledges that he’s never met the kid, but it’s never followed up on, and John Wells had to explain things years later in an interview. One of the more iconic scenes of that first season is Polish-born orderly “Bob” revealing herself to be a vascular surgeon during a moment of crisis in a mass casualty, but then the character was dropped later because the writers were having a hard time finding room to service all the show’s more prominent figures. You also see certain recurring characters come and go based on the increasing profiles of the actors playing them. William H. Macy and Ving Rhames are around for most of the season as, respectively, ER chief David Morganstern and Benton’s brother-in-law Walt, but soon would be in too much demand by movie directors. (Amusingly, Walt isn’t in the Tarantino episode, even though Pulp Fiction had made Rhames famous enough to graduate from the show.)

• Benton, and the Benton/Carter relationship, remain my favorite part of the show, which I wrote about when ER first came to streaming six years ago. But my response to other characters has changed in interesting ways. In particular, I had little time for Susan Lewis back in the mid-Nineties, but the stories about her struggle to stand up for herself against arrogant, sexist male attending doctors really resonated on this viewing. Meanwhile, even though Clooney’s star power is undeniable, Doug Ross’s cowboy antics are a bit less charming now.

• Speaking of which, it’s impressive that Wells was able to keep the show a pure ensemble even as Clooney was exploding in popularity. It would be very easy to have turned ER into a show about an incredibly handsome and charismatic pediatrician, with minor subplots about his coworkers. Instead, the narrative is split pretty evenly among the six regulars throughout the season. In later years, as the ensemble got bigger, some characters like Carter or Abby were treated as more overt leads, while others were always secondary. But the balance here really works.

Odds and/or ends

• My one review this week over at Rolling Stone is of Apple’s Time Bandits remake from Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi, and Iain Morris. The trio have made what is basically the version of the Terry Gilliam film I thought I wanted as a kid in 1981, but in a way that suggests Gilliam’s instincts on the subject were better than mine.

• Last month, I wrote about how Homicide: Life on the Street was on the verge of ending its reign as The Best TV Show You Can’t Stream. Now, it’s official: remastered episodes arrive on Peacock next month. To mark the occasion, the always-candid Tom Fontana spoke with Vulture about how this finally happened, and also tells a funny and/or maddening story about a call he got a while back about rebooting the series.

• Just putting a pin in this for sometime next month: I’ve been racing to catch up on Evil, which I last watched early in its second season, so I can write about it before the series finale in a couple of weeks. I’m saving my bigger thoughts for that column, but for the moment I’ll say that it has grown into one of the most delightfully weird TV shows I’ve seen in quite some time, maybe even since Hannibal, and has very much lived up to the best-case scenario I laid out in my review of the first four episodes way back in 2019.

• You may recall that critics were not given the Presumed Innocent finale in advance of the show’s premiere. So my review was written without any knowledge of whether David E. Kelley had kept the famous ending from the book and film, or come up with something else. The finale dropped earlier this week, and I realized that I had no enthusiasm for seeing it, based on the execution up to that point, even though I’d enjoyed some of the performances from Peter Sarsgard, Bill Camp, and others. So I skipped it. I know what happens, but have no interest in offering an opinion on something I didn’t watch. Instead, I would suggest you read Linda Holmes’ take on what Kelley chose to do, and why she was not pleased. Curious for thoughts from everyone who stuck it out to the end.

You couldn’t script this?

On Sunday morning, The New York Times published an op-ed by Aaron Sorkin where the Emmy and Oscar winner wrote about how he would script a Democratic convention, built around the idea of Joe Biden stepping down and the Dems nominating Mitt Romney. The piece was roundly, and rightly, mocked, and within hours, non-scripted events had rendered it moot: President Biden announced that he actually was stepping down, he endorsed Kamala Harris as his successor, and the Democratic Party quickly coalesced around the vice-president. By the afternoon, Sorkin (with some help from his frequent muse Josh Malina) took back the Romney idea and threw his support behind Harris.

I bring this up here, in a space that famously steers away from the political, because the sheer amount of intersecting between political fact and political TV fiction of the past week has become impossible to ignore. What’s happening right now with Vice-President Harris isn’t exactly the plot of the middle seasons of Veep, but it’s close. On Veep, Selina Meyer was already running for president when her boss stepped down from the presidency altogether due to his wife’s health issues, rather than his own, and as a result she was campaigning while serving as POTUS. The situations are eerily similar enough that even Veep creator Armando Iannucci joked that he was still working on how to end that story arc.

Meanwhile, the Internet on Wednesday went so wild with a rumor about the Republican vice-presidential nominee that the Associated Press felt it necessary to publish a debunking piece with the following headline:

The AP later pulled the story, claiming that it “didn’t go through our standard editing process.” (O perhaps someone explained the Streisand effect to them?) But the idea of it conjured up images of Netflix’s Big Mouth, where Jay Bilzarian has had torrid affairs with both pillows and couch cushions. It’s crazy.

But back to Sorkin. The Romney editorial shouldn’t be surprising at all if you’ve paid attention to his work, both the great stuff like The West Wing and the awful stuff like The Newsroom. Sorkin’s always been a centrist, and always preached a philosophy that political victories can be won by anyone making a convincing enough argument. We’ve seen from the last few decades of American political tribalism that the latter idea is very much not true: some people will ignore not only subjective arguments, but objective facts, if it comes into conflict with the side they’ve already chosen. Sorkin likes the fantasy, though, and still acts like he can make current events better, if only anybody would listen. (The Newsroom was two seasons of him basically scolding the media and Washington in something not too distant to real time.) But I suppose the more that our political reality begins to resemble absurdist TV fiction, the easier it is for him, or any writer, to think so.

That’s it for this week! What did everybody else think?