
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, December 8, 1994                   TAG: 9412100004
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

FAST-PACED 'ER' IS SHOW WITH A PULSE

It warms a critic's heart (yes, critics have hearts) when a show he picked as the best new series of the year also turns out to be the most popular new series of the year. That's the happy case with ``ER,'' the new NBC medical series that yours truly, and many other critics, loved from the first incision and that the national audience has made the most successful new drama series in a decade. It has the highest first-season ratings since ``Murder She Wrote'' debuted in 1984.

Anyone wondering if the producers can keep the quality up only need tune in this tonight's episode to discover that at ``ER,'' all the vital signs are go go go.

``Blizzard'' is a breathtaking hour about how the women and men of the emergency room react when a 9-inch snowstorm hobbles the city of Chicago and contributes to a 32-vehicle pileup on the Kennedy Expressway. What had been a dull winter's night - with doctors and interns playing soccer in wheelchairs - turns into choreographed chaos, as the injured and dying stream in.

``Yo, where's your thumb?'' a doctor asks one young man with a mangled hand. ``It's right here,'' the young man says, holding up a small plastic bag with a lump inside. Half of another man's leg is brought to the emergency room wrapped in aluminum foil. Blood gushes from injured patients. One elderly man, who has stopped breathing, comes to life when a female doctor reaches into his chest and massages his heart.

Did we mention this is ``ER's'' Christmas show? Well it is, and it's not just that old man's heart that gets massaged. Deftly, nimbly, unsentimentally, this special episode tells its tales of trauma in ways that are moving but never mawkish. ``ER'' is a hit-and-run hit; it zooms ahead at such a feverish pace from crisis to crisis that there's never time to dawdle or wallow.

Dr. Douglas Ross (George Clooney) has only a moment to look on sorrowfully as a nun says prayers over a patient he has lost. Then he has to rush into the next room for another emergency. Even as he is performing surgery on one patient, Dr. Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards) is shouting instructions over a speakerphone to a plumber who is at home trying to help his wife deliver their first baby.

``ER'' is about resiliency and it calls for resiliency in the viewer. You may be deeply saddened by one turn of events but, like the characters in the show, you have to pull yourself together and move on.

It's been speculated that one reason ``ER'' has caught on so big is that it's the first drama designed for the age of remote-control channel surfing. ``ER,'' the theory goes, does the switching for you, speeding quickly from one patient's story to the next before anybody has a chance to get bored - or click to another station.

But other shows have tried to appeal to short attention spans and failed. Michael Crichton, who created ``ER,'' had been trying to get the show made for a decade, so it can't very well have been designed just for the '90s. The trick that the creative team brings off each week is accelerating the pace of a drama show without undercutting dramatic impact. Some nights you come away reeling, but reeling gratefully.

``ER'' is a show about hope rewarded. Although the doctors, nurses and interns of the emergency room come off as realistically imperfect people, most of them clearly know what they're doing and care about doing it well. All defeats are momentary and they plunge on hoping a victory is right around the corner. And it usually is.

Of course the writing, acting, directing, camera work and all the technical aspects of the show are first-rate. The cast is unimpeachably good. They should get paid by the yard, for all the running around they have to do. That goes for the guys carrying the cameras, too.

But beyond the usual attributes of a quality show, ``ER's'' spectacular showing in the ratings can be explained in six words: ``It's going to be all right.'' This is the implicit reassuring message week after week. ``ER'' doesn't just give you faith that the health care crisis can be managed, it gives you faith that modern life in all its perilous uncertainty can be managed, too - that somehow we're all going to keep our wits about us and cope.

Some of us won't - but it's nice to be told we have a chance.

And when network TV can come up with a show as brilliant as ``ER,'' it's enough to make you think that maybe television is going to be all right, too.

- Washington Post Writers Group

by CNB