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If 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's a rhythmic instinct to slow down in television," says Crichton. "But our show had to go as fast as the real thing. We got rid of the pauses, those actors' moments, the hanging looks that mean nothing. Medical shows have been at the Marcus Welby pace: meet a patient, portray the disease of the week and finish with some heart-wrenching solution. Here we just rip people in and out."
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-held-camera affectations of NYPD Blue, its only rival as TV's best dramatic series.
The 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."
Crichton has stayed closely involved in the series, taking part in some story meetings and watching the "dailies" -- footage from each day's shooting. "I get notes on dailies that he's written at 4 a.m.," says fellow executive producer John Wells, a former China Beach hand who was brought in to run the show. Spielberg too has been a surprisingly active presence. Supervising producer Robert Nathan says that for one episode he wrote, Spielberg sent him three-page memos on each draft of the script. Later Spielberg watched the rough cut and offered more suggestions. "He was amazing," says Nathan. "He would look at a scene and say, 'I think Take 2 was a little dryer.' He remembered everything from the dailies two or three weeks earlier."