ER: There’s no Mekhi Phifer

Posted by sara September 26th, 2008 at 01:00pm In General

The words of the prophet Eminem have come true.

I have been watching ER since it started, on and off. Mostly on. Back when it started I wasn’t allowed to stay up late enough to watch Friends, much less ER right after it. Yeah, that was a hundred years ago, when George Clooney had big hair.

He’s a pediatrician with abandonment issues! Who can resist this?

And this show has been breaking my damn heart since I was thirteen years old. I’m getting sick of it. They just keep killing people; I don’t know how I can live in a world where Greene, Gallant, Lucy Knight, Sandy Lopez, Gant, Pratt, both of Chen’s parents, and even Romano and that priest James Cromwell played are dead and Izzie Stevens still lives.

I’ve always liked how ER has split the difference between being a procedural and being serialized. I’ve missed big chunks here and there, but it’s always easy to come back in and figure out pretty quickly who is sleeping with whom (usually Dr. Greene/a nurse, Neela/a doctor, or Sam/anyone), whose elderly parents are the AARP-certified sadface storyline of the month, and whose troubled childhood/past is rearing its ugly head (Carter, Abby, Ross, Luka, Kirsten Dunst). And then there’s the Gruesome Case of the Week. This week it was a gross, throbbing neck thing and an impaling; in the past we’ve seen Omar Epps jump in front of a train, Carter perform a field amputation, Romano participate in a field amputation, and enough traumatic childbirth to keep me celibate throughout high school (ER might be the only comprehensive sex ed kids are getting now—oh my God, this show was on before America stopped believing in evolution and condoms! I miss the nineties).

My roommate points out that we’ve thought we were watching the last season of ER since we met each other. Since then John Leguizamo has shown up, I think Lewis came back, Shane West got de-leg-itated, and Linda Cardellini went through like four different combinations of actors playing her babydaddy and kid (one of them was Cole Hauser! Really). I’m fully prepared for this last, we swear, totally the last season to be wrenching and portentous and give me a twitch in my eye the way listening to … you know what, no. I’m not going to admit listening to anything on this list. Except for the Cranberries. They are still on my iPod.