When ER showed up on Amazon Prime I was excited: Finally I could see the best medical show there was! Now, 25 episodes later, I'm quite disappointed. The way, this show is written and filmed makes every 25 episodes blur into each other into a hectic but not very interesting plot blob. To start with something positive: Anthony Edwards is absolutely stunning as Mark Greene. The episode where he spends the night with a dying patient was heartbreaking and of an intensity, which so far only the first episodes of Grey's Anatomy season 17 achieved! But he (and Susan) can't rescue what's not working for me:
The medical drama in each episode is intense and chaotic. It's filmed on long shots, where the camera follows through the building or rotates around the table. There's always a heart condition, a rash, drug addict and some gunshot wounds. Have you seen one episode you have seen them all. That's a problem many medical shows have, but I never felt this so obviously thrown into my face than in ER. Maybe this worked good when watching one episode per week; when binging you get tired of more of the same in each episode.
The personal drama is only shown in fragments. Most of the time, important events happen between the episodes and not in the episodes. What happened with Mark and Jennifer? She allowed him to stay in Chicago, then he leaves him because of that and a week later they are together again, but now he has to commute 2 hours, while she doesn't wanted to accept moving into a city where both could commute only 1 hour? Nothing of that is explained in the show. What happened to Benton, his mother and the nursing home? He didn't want that, his sister wanted. At the end he chooses the home by himself, ignoring his sister, who said that this is a decision for all of them. And what happened to Susan and her valentine days joke friend? Or her ex boyfriend? That's where Grey's Anatomy and even Chicago Med deliver: Consistent stories of the staff so that you care.
The last thing which does not work for me are the jokes. Workers which crash through the ceiling on top of a patient? No hospital especially in the US would allow this to happen. They would be sued immediately. And "Bob"? Put aside the stupid joke about her name: She is polish and does not know the difference between thanksgiving and eastern? That's lazy writing. And in season 2 they make a joke about germanic ancestry. Most polish are slavic and I would be VERY careful to tell them anything about germanic ancestry. You do not joke about a war in which Poland had about 6 million losses.
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