Word: erringly
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Some have attributed ER's success to Americans' current anxiety about health care. A more likely explanation is simply that it supplies something that's been missing from TV for years. Medical dramas have long been out of fashion; the last successful one, St. Elsewhere, was less concerned with the nuts and bolts of medical care than with often baroque interpersonal drama and nuthouse comedy. ER has rediscovered the primal appeal of the doctor show, and a new generation of viewers is eagerly watching...
...that were all ER had going for it, then Chicago Hope would be a big hit too. But ER is probably the most realistic doctor show TV has ever done. That realism goes beyond the graphic operating-room scenes and rapid-fire medical jargon ("O.K., we gotta go with it -- 5,000 units heparin, tPA 10 milligrams, push. Sixty over one hour. Let's get another EKG. Keep him on the monitor ..."). The show's hopped-up pace and jumbled texture -- stories start, stop and overlap seemingly at random -- set it apart from almost anything else on the air. "There...
Actually, that is a good description of the adrenaline-pumped two-hour premiere episode. Since then, ER has settled back into more conventional storytelling, with predictable character developments, comic interludes and some unwelcome sentimentality. On last week's episode, surgeon Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards) brought his young daughter to the hospital, and her wise- child observations were enough to induce diabetic shock. (Talking to a little girl whom her father has just treated: "My daddy's your doctor." "(Will) he help make me better?" "That's what doctors do.") Still, the show has retained its grungy immediacy, without the hand...
...script for ER had been sitting in Crichton's trunk since 1974, when the former Harvard medical student wrote it as a movie screenplay. It languished until the late 1980s, when Steven Spielberg read it and got interested. But Spielberg was more interested in another Crichton project -- Jurassic Park -- and ER sat around for a few more years, until someone at Spielberg's Amblin Productions suggested turning it into a TV pilot. "Almost nothing was changed," says Crichton, "except cleaning up the language...
Despite the authenticity of its hospital scenes, ER has not escaped criticism from the medical community. Dr. Gerald P. Whelan, a member of the American Board of Emergency Medicine, complained in the Los Angeles Times that ER shows untrained medical students doing procedures they would never be allowed to perform in a real emergency room. "The American public is being presented with a picture of emergency medical care that is 20 years outdated," he wrote. Dr. Lance Gentile, an emergency-room physician who is on the ER staff as writer and technical consultant, dismisses such complaints. "These groups are concerned...