25 Things You Never Knew About ER

Some fun facts here ... a few I found surprising 


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Here we go:


[h1]25 Things You Never Knew About ER
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George Clooney's method for memorizing medical jargon is inspired.

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BY EMMA DIBDIN
MAR 1, 2018





There’s a lot of exciting new television debuting in 2018, and yet arguably the most exciting addition to the streaming landscape has been a show that actually debuted way back in 1994. Thanks to Hulu, ER is now available to binge in full for the first time this year, and a whole legion of new viewers are discovering the groundbreaking drama for the first time. In celebration of the show’s new lease of life, here are 25 things you never knew about ER.
[size=101]1Julianna Margulies’ Carol was supposed to die in the pilot.[/size]
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Carol Hathaway’s suicide attempt in the pilot is a shocking and abrupt twist, but in the original version of the episode it was also supposed to be fatal. Test audiences responded so positively to Carol that this idea was scrapped, and so although Margulies is credited as a guest star for the first episode, she went on to become one of the show’s most beloved and pivotal regular characters.
[size=101]2ER is the most Emmy-nominated show in television history.[/size]
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The show earned a total of 124 Emmy nominations across its 15 season run, and won 22 of them, including the Outstanding Drama Series award for season 2, and a Best Supporting Actress award for Margulies in season 1. More performers on this show have received Emmy nominations—across the lead, supporting, and guest actor categories—than for any other series.
[size=101]3The romance between Dr Benton and Dr Corday was cut short for a very specific reason.[/size]
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Eriq La Salle and Alex Kingston had insane chemistry, and a lot of fans were disappointed when their characters’ romance was cut short. But La Salle asked producers to end the relationship because he was uneasy with the fact that Benton’s romance with Corday, a white woman, was depicted so much more positively than his previous relationships with two black women in the show (Gloria Reuben’s Jeanie and Lisa Nicole Carson’s Carla). “As an African American man, it becomes a bit offensive if the negative things are all you’re showing,” he said. “Because in real life, we romance and get on each other’s nerves and laugh and do all the things that any other race of people do.”



[size=101]4George Clooney had a sneaky method for remembering his lines.[/size]
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Ever notice that Doug Ross spent a lot of time looking down—at patients in their hospital beds, at clipboards—or hanging his head? That’s because Clooney developed a technique for "remembering" all of his complex medical dialogue, which involved writing his lines on props so that he could consult them during scenes. According to PBS’s Pioneers of Television, he started doing this while shooting ER and movies at the same time, in order to deal with the workload.
[size=101]5ER was originally planned as a movie.[/size]
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Steven Spielberg was set to direct the original big-screen version of ER, which Michael Crichton wrote as “a documentary-style movie about what happened during 24 hours in an emergency room.” Nobody would make the film, finding it too “technical, too chaotic and too fast-moving,” per Crichton, and so the script was shelved for two decades until NBC came along.
[size=101]6Though the pilot was written in 1974, only one significant change was made when it was filmed in 1994.[/size]
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Despite the fact that the feature script for ER had sat on the shelf for so long by the time it made it to television in 1994, what ended up being filmed was almost word-for-word Crichton’s original screenplay from 1974. One very significant change, though, was in casting, because Crichton’s script centered on five white, male doctors, so Dr Lewis became a woman and Dr Benton became a black man.



[size=101]7That iconic basketball hoop was George Clooney’s idea.[/size]
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The addition of the basketball hoop outside the ambulance bay at County General ended up creating a key new location for the show, but originally, George Clooney had the idea simply because he liked to shoot a few hoops to unwind between takes. He asked for the hoop to be installed on the Burbank studio lot, but it ended up in an area where it could be picked up by the camera, and so it was incorporated into the show.
[size=101]8ER and Friends had several semi-crossovers.[/size]
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NETFLIX + NBC
Both shows were part of NBC’s wildly successful Thursday night lineup in the mid-'90s, and the network took advantage by having Clooney and Wyle make an appearance as doctors in the first season of Friends, in the episode where Rachel switches identities with Monica to use her health insurance. Though it’s not a real crossover—ER is set in Chicago while Friends is in New York—it was a nice tidbit for fans of both shows. There are several other subtle Friends easter eggs buried through the show; David Schwimmer plays a doctor in the season three premiere, though his face is never seen, and Dr Greene’s daughter’s name is Rachel Greene—one letter away from the Friends character Rachel Green.
[size=101]9ER really did shoot in Chicago.[/size]
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Some of the time, that is. Though the interiors of the show were filmed at the Warner Bros studio in Burbank, California, filming would move to Chicago a couple of times each season. During these visits, enough exterior scenes would be shot for several episodes, encompassing familiar Chicago landmarks like the “L” rapid transit system and the Michigan Avenue Bridge.



[size=101]10Julianna Margulies was opposed to the idea of her character changing from a nurse to a doctor.[/size]
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Producers were keen for Carol to make the change from nurse to doctor, and the character is shown seriously considering the possibility in season three, even taking the med school entrance exam. But Margulies objected, on the grounds that Carol had always been so proud of being a nurse that the change felt out of character for her. Several seasons later, Maura Tierney’s character Abby did become a doctor after being a nurse.
[size=101]11Season 14 was supposed to be the last.[/size]
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But the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike cut the episode count down so much that the producers knew they wouldn’t have long enough to give the show a full send-off. For that reason, NBC agreed to bring ER back for a fifteenth and final season, which ran from September 2008 through to April 2009.
[size=101]12Laura Innes and Noah Wyle tied as the longest-running cast members.[/size]
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Both appeared in 13 out of 15 seasons. Wyle’s Dr Carter was a series regular from the beginning of season 1 until season 11's finale, but he returned for several episodes in season 12 and in season 15. Innes’ Dr Weaver first appeared in season 2, and remained as a regular until midway through season 13, then returned for a handful of season 15 episodes. Both actors returned for the series finale.



[size=101]13This was not George Clooney’s first ER.[/size]
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What are the odds of this? Ten years before he was cast in ER, Clooney booked his first regular TV role—in a short-lived 1984 comedy series called E/R, which was also set in the emergency room of a fictional Chicago hospital. Mary McDonnell was also in E/R, and would go on to be cast in ER as Eleanor Carter.
[size=101]14Many surgeries on the show were inspired by real-life operations.[/size]
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ER’s writers visited a number of hospitals in the Los Angeles area to get inspiration for new medical storylines, and would often adapt real events with a slightly more dramatic twist. An episode in which a baby has a coat hanger stuck in its throat was inspired by a real incident, but in the show the baby was much more severely injured and needed a tracheotomy—in real life, the doctors were able to simply remove the coat hanger.
[size=101]15Noah Wyle put the kibosh on one particular romance.[/size]
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Dr Carter got involved with plenty of co-workers throughout his time on the show, but there was one relationship that Wyle objected to. Producers wanted to pair Carter with medical student Lucy Knight (Kellie Martin), but Wyle (understandably) felt it would be out of character and inappropriate for Carter to date a subordinate.



[size=101]16Clooney “begged” to audition for the show.[/size]
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Hard though it is to imagine now, executive producer John Wells [url=https://books.google.com/books?id=pB3qGARr-CgC&pg=PA203&lpg=PA203&dq="george+clooney+begged+me+for+a+part"&source=bl&ots=3pdzIk6m3X&sig=wUAxPlONrt9Fe3cN2E43XM5VEtI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMI_ZLjyIT9xwIVQXs-Ch1iTQ6A#v=onepage&q="george clooney begged me for a]said[/url] Clooney “begged [him] for a part.” At that time, Clooney was 33 and still in search of his breakout role. "Our second day in the office, George showed up and wouldn't leave until I'd let him audition,” Wells recalled. “George got his hands on the material and was like a dog with a bone."
[size=101]17Noah Wyle once had to film scenes while on a saline drip.[/size]
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Wyle fell sick with mono during the filming of season 1’s memorably devastating "Love’s Labor Lost," and was so unwell that the on-set medical technician put him on an IV, and he shot his scenes with a bag of saline in his pocket.
[size=101]18Actress Glenne Headly was pregnant throughout her appearance as Dr Abby Keaton.[/size]
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Headly appeared in several episodes of the third season as pediatric surgeon Keaton, but the writers decided not to write her pregnancy into the show because they felt her affair with Dr Carter would be hard to buy if the character were heavily pregnant. As a result, elaborate measures were taken to hide Headly’s pregnancy: She wore oversized scrubs, and was filmed behind gurneys and desks.



[size=101]19Dr Weaver’s limp ended up becoming a real problem for Laura Innes.[/size]
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In season 11, Dr Weaver undergoes a surgery for her congenital hip dysplasia to eliminate her limp. This was because Innes had developed back problems after a decade of playing Weaver with a cane. “My real back was getting screwed up,” she said. “I got a bone density test and the bottom of my spine is starting to curve on one side from ten years of raising my hip.”
[size=101]20ER has one of the most star-studded guest casts in TV history.[/size]
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Any show that runs as long as ER did is likely to have a lot of before-they-were-famous guest stars, but the future A-list quotient was exceedingly high on this show. Just a few examples: Kirsten Dunst had a memorable six-episode stint as a teenage sex worker, Gabrielle Union played an injured basketball player, Ewan McGregor played a robber, Lucy Liu played an AIDS patient’s mother, Taraji P. Henson played Dr Benton’s niece, and Dakota Fanning played a young leukemia patient.
[size=101]21There are a lot of parallels between the show’s first season and its last.[/size]
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As you’d expect for a show that ran this long, all of the original cast departed at some point, but unusually, they all appeared in the final season. The entire original cast (Anthony Edwards, Noah Wyle, George Clooney, Eriq La Salle, Sherry Stringfield, and Julianna Margulies) appeared in season 15. Also, “Dr Greene” was both the first line and the last line ever spoken in the show; in the pilot it’s addressed to Dr Mark Greene, and in the finale it’s said to his daughter, Rachel.



[size=101]22ER and Chicago Hope were in direct competition with each other.[/size]
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The two hospital dramas premiered just one day apart in 1994; ER on NBC and Chicago Hope on CBS, but eventually wound up competing directly against each other on Thursday nights at 10 P.M. ER had consistently higher ratings, and ran for fifteen seasons versus Chicago Hope’s six. The two shows also competed at the Emmys, and while ER was the only one to win Best Drama Series, Chicago Hope earned more acting Emmys for its cast.
[size=101]23The pilot was filmed at a real hospital.[/size]
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Lacking the time and resources to build a full set for the pilot, the production team opted to shoot the ER pilot in a disused hospital in Los Angeles. It was the Linda Vista Community Hospital, a facility which operated from 1904 through to 1990. Since its closure, the hospital has developed a reputation for being haunted, and was the subject of an episode of Ghost Adventures.
[size=101]24The first four episodes of the show all began in the same way.[/size]
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That is: One of the doctors is trying to get some sleep in Exam 8 during a brutally long shift, but is awoken by a nurse telling them there’s a patient on the way. From the pilot through episode four, this scene happens with Dr Greene, Dr Lewis, Dr Benton, and Dr Carter. George Clooney’s Doug Ross was the only one of the original five doctors never shown sleeping in Exam 8.



[size=101]25NBC had some reservations about the show before it premiered.​​[/size]
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The very first screening of the ER pilot for executives did not go well. “When the lights came up, it was not a very positive reaction,” Kevin Reilly, who was NBC’s VP of drama development at the time, told EW. He recalled that Don Ohlmeyer, NBC’s west coast president at the time, was so unhappy that he “stormed out of the room. Once Don had declared that he was less than happy with it, that kind of set the tone.” Concerns at the time were numerous: Execs worried that the show was too gory, that its script was too full of medical jargon, that it moved too fast and featured too many characters. “All the things that ended up becoming the hallmarks of the series,” executive producer John Wells noted.

About fact 1:
I remember I once saw an ER reminiscence - I think it was before the very last episode started.
There Julianna talked about that she had been planned to die after her suicide trial in the very first episode, but George tried to keep her in the show since he saw her potential. He begged the producers to do so after they had finished filming the pilot, and Julianna said that she returned to New York to audition for a beach show. When she came home, she got a call from George saying that they thought about keeping her in the show, so she should wait before waxing for the beach show.

I guess there are many other facts about ER which were worth telling...

Oh my

What a nice jump in the past !!


Thanks!!