Watching The Pitt made me curious about ER, which I hadn’t watched since early in the 90s– so long ago that I can’t even tell you when, or who was on it, or anything. I can’t tell whether ER was conventional at the time, or whether it seems conventional because it warped the genre around itself in a way that just feels conventional now because we take it for granted. What feels conventional now is the show’s frenetic action, the quasi-familial camraderie of the employees, and the drama in the lives of the main characters; and I find all of that a little less interesting (if still watchable) than shows that still read as a bit more innovative and off-beat.
But the thing that grabbed me about S1 of ER, honestly, is that there’s this phase in the early episodes where the show can’t quite figure out what it wants to be: the stories of the patients are a little less conventional and sketched in, and the cinematography and the drama is more melodramatic and over the top. It feels less like a TV show about a workplace, and more some theatrical setting for grand narratives about life and death and the cruelties of fate. (The elderly couple in “Day One” sticks in my head, for some reason.) Some of those qualities remain as the show settles down, but tonally it’s a much calmer show– even in those episodes, like “Love’s Labor Lost,” that are pretty tough dramatically. It became a show about a bunch of competent, devoted people who rise above the challenges of their personal lives to do something noble; but those early episodes represent a path not taken.