When I think back on the TV shows I watched in 2021, frankly all of them will pale in comparison to the most ambitious television project I ever took on: watching every single episode of ER in one year. Michael Crichton’s medical drama was a staple of NBC’s Must-See TV Thursday night lineup from 1994-2009, a run that encompassed 331 episodes over 15 seasons. At a minimum of 45 minutes per episode, that’s more than 10 days of screen time. So whenever I ate, whenever I was getting ready for bed, whenever I had a project, I would put ER on. I lived and breathed Chicago’s County General Hospital from January until I finished the show in late November.
What did I learn from all that watching? TV has really changed! Not just the obvious shift from shows being only being on TV to wherever we are now, but all the little things. ER was a “water cooler show” that people watched and talked about for like half the year every year. Now we’re lucky if we can find one other person tweeting about a show we like at the same time as we’re watching it. ER was big enough to attract A-list guest stars, which at the time were people like Sally Field and Ray Liotta because there was still a stigma that movie actors don’t do TV. Now it almost seems reversed – actors do shows and miniseries to flex their talent. Remember 22 episode seasons? Remember how networks used to hate serialized storytelling? Remember the disappointment you’d feel when an episode ended in “to be continued”?! Those were they days.
