Blogocentric Formulations

ER is some great stuff

Okay, if you haven't seen ER before and don't want me to spoil it for you, stop reading right now. But that's the only spoiler alert you're going to get, because I'm going to talk about Season 8, which aired almost ten years ago. So if you don't know what happens and don't want to know, don't read any further.

My wife and I are on a mission to see the entire series run of ER on Netflix. We just keep watching season after season. She had seen probably half the episodes at various stages in reruns, and I'd only seen the first and last season, with a few other episodes in between. And damn, what a great freakin' show. I'm a little sad that I missed it during it's actual run. We just got finished with Season 8, which is the season where Peter Benton and Mark Greene both exit the show (in very different ways). I couldn't help but think about how amazing the show was, to make us care about these characters for eight years... to draw us into their lives and show us so many sides of these characters. Peter Benton is a hotshot surgeon who ends up with a hearing-impaired son and having to make a difficult decision between the career he's always wanted and the father he eventually knew he had to become. Mark Greene was a great doctor who struggled with divorce, unrequited love, an unruly teenage daughter, a new wife and baby, and - finally - a brain tumor.

If anybody wants to learn how to write great characters that stay with a reader, watch the first eight season of ER, and especially Season 8. It's a master class in how writers can create characters that feel so real and three-dimensional that you root for them week after week, staying with them through all the highs and lows, and feeling like a part of you has been lost when they leave and aren't in your life anymore.

I hope I can write characters like that someday.