Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
After 15 years of frenetic action, baffling jargon and decidedly non-saintly doctors, ER is finally closing its doors. There is just time to gather round the screen and pay your last respects.
After 15 years and more MIs, EKGs, tox screens and central line insertions than it is possible to count, the nonpareil of medical dramas is about to leave us. It will be a sad parting.
In the early 90s, the cop show was king. Hill Street Blues had captured the nation's attention in the previous decade and spawned countless imitators. The best of them - Homicide: Life On the Streets and NYPD Blue - dominated the networks' schedules, imaginations and commissions. The medical drama was all but dead.
Then in September 1994 the two-hour pilot episode of ER, written by blockbuster novelist and former medical student Michael Crichton and co-produced by Steven Spielberg's company Amblin, hit the screens and suddenly, like a mighty defibrillator, reanimated the genre's moribund form.
It won eight Emmys in its first year and quickly became the most successful hospital drama in the world, both in terms of viewing figures and in setting new narrative and visual standards for television drama.
Apart from the unprecedented speed with which scenes whipped past, the unapologetic embrace of jargon commanded most of the attention at first but gradually, hapless lay viewers, such as me, began to decipher the code.
Now, after 14 series, I daresay the committed ER fan could walk into any county hospital and confidently order a tox screen, CBC, chem-7 and cross-table C-spine with the best of them.
Actor Alex Kingston, who played the (terribly) British surgeon Elizabeth Corday for eight seasons of the show and is returning for the 15th, recalls that when she first started she did not know what she was saying. "Not at all. But when you hear it daily and have real doctors on hand to make sense of your lines and procedures for you, it gets easier. Quite often you could kid yourself you were doing it properly, especially as everything on set was real."
So you had the language, the machines, the documentary feel of the camerawork - but was ER truly realistic? Perhaps the honest answer is: it was as realistic as a drama aiming at widespread popularity can be.
As Anne Karpf, author of Doctoring the Media, points out, the first question patients are asked in a US hospital is 'Are you insured?' and if the answer - as it frequently is - is no, they are unceremoniously shown the door.
"It's not exactly social realism," says Karpf. "You wouldn't use it as a primer of what's going on in medical care, but you can't have it be warts-and-all and still work as a drama."
Nevertheless, ER did frequently protest against the incursions into the hospital system by bureaucrats, the budget cuts and compromises forced upon doctors and uninsured patients by an unjust system. This, combined with its frenetic energy, was enough to make it seem like cinema verite compared to what had come before.
Gone were the selfless, idealised and idealistic secular saints in white coats. Here instead were doctors who were human and fallible, whose personal lives were usually a mess and frequently intruded on the professional and vice versa.
Out went Dr Kildare's languorously holistic approach. In came the modern urban medical mantra 'Treat 'em and street 'em'.
ER was embraced by the public on a grand scale because it was a show that recognised that we are an assertive, informed, cynical, brutal and brutalised society that is not ready to accept authority - with or without a white coat - unquestioningly.
It should be a fitting end for a well-loved and deservedly admired show that redefined the way we see both medicine and drama.
Nurse, the screens - switch them off.
