CRITICAL ROUNDUP
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ER Checks Out Tonight
Critics, fans, brace for last episode tonight
By Matt Cantor
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Posted Apr 2, 09 10:54 AM CDT
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(Newser)
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After 15 seasons, viewers will make their final trip to County General Hospital tonight in the series finale of ER. Critics and fans are reflecting on the groundbreaking show:
- Mixing “medical triumph” with “personal angst,” ER “may have begun as a show about salvation, but it became a show about the near impossibility of salvation—a show less about healing than about damage,” writes Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times.
- Fans writing to Slate agree that “the show exhausted the standard emergency-room plots in its first decade or so, but its three-dimensional characters kept viewers coming back.”
- Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times observes that ER’s final hours have been underscored by “creators’ fear of oblivion,” echoed onscreen as characters fade from importance.
- Writing in the New York Daily News, David Hinckley pulls for a positive but not "gooey" wrap-up. “I want the show to end like ER, not like a Hallmark movie.”