And in fact, if you don’t talk down to your audience, they appreciate it and reward you.”ĮR’s origins can be traced back to the early 1970s, when Michael Crichton was a bestselling science-fiction novelist and filmmaker. You do not have to talk down to your audience. “And particularly video literate, in that they’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of hours of storytelling and they can follow. “The audience is intelligent,” Wells says. And in fact, if you don’t talk down to your audience, they appreciate it and reward you.” -John Wells, ER executive producer and showrunner
“You do not have to talk down to your audience. Its influence can still be seen in the hundreds of uncompromising hour-long shows that have followed.
The series featured complex characters and through its story lines boldly tackled dozens of issues of the day, including racism, AIDS, substance use disorders, and domestic violence. It was created by one of the world’s most popular authors, shepherded by Hollywood’s most powerful director, and bolstered by a diverse cast filled with stars, up-and-comers, and a future Academy Award–winning leading man. Long before “prestige drama” was a thing, ER had all the qualities of one. But I think it made for really good, exciting television that people hadn’t seen before.” Sometimes it made for a less compelling, in a standard narrative sense, kind of a story. “That was the major decision that we made early on, that we weren’t gonna do anything that wouldn’t actually really happen. “You know somehow if you’re watching something that you feel is real, and something where the artifice is apparent,” says Wells, the original executive producer and first showrunner of ER. In the end, however, it’s also what made it revolutionary. The show’s verisimilitude nearly stopped it from ever getting made. This was the world into which ER arrived on September 19, 1994. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, it doesn’t happen that way.’” “The doctors have to save everybody!” producer John Wells remembers hearing back then.
It’s become a convention of the genre, but a quarter-century ago, the idea of even minor television characters regularly croaking scared stodgy networks to, well, death. The first rule of making a realistic medical drama is morbidly simple: patients must die.