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WhenERfirst premiered 25 years ago, prime-time medical dramas were not new on television.
Elsewherein the 1980s, and earlier shows likeDr.
Kildare,Marcus WelbyM.D., andMedical Center.
ButERwas the best of them.
There have been a lot of great TV doctors, onERand on lots of other shows.
Dr. Taub has a love child with one of the nurses onHouse.
Nurses are occasionally ball busters or rabble rousers.
(OnNew Amsterdam,the nurses staged a walkout but almost none of these nurse characters have names.)
Nurses are almost always secondary figures, in other words.
This was not the case onER, pretty much from the jump.
If you think about Lydia compared with many other long-runningERcharacters, shes pretty unremarkable.
She was on fewer episodes than other nurses likeHaleh(Yvette Freeman) or Malik (Deezer D).
She is much less visible than the most notable nurse on the show, Julianna Margulies Carol Hathaway.
Shes a minor figure.
There are signs and pieces of paper hung all over the walls.
No one mentions it, and Greene hardly even flinches.
Most of them we never see again, because theyre just one more piece of the inescapable background buzz.
It wasradicalforERto make its show as much about the nurses as it was about the doctors.
Nurses were not just fun background figures onER.
Carol decides against it.
She is better, more useful, and happier where she is.
Nurses also helpedERunderline one of its favorite early topics: the ins and outs of labor politics inside medicine.
For that we are paid $23,739 before taxes, Benton says.
We also have to make the coffee?
While the other doctors chuckle, Benton gets up to make the coffee.
It was an ongoing story onER, a recurring awareness that nurses were both indispensable and often underappreciated.
It was not just good storytelling.
