ER
ER is an American medical drama series created by novelist Michael Crichton that aired on NBC from September 1994 to April 2009. It is set primarily in the emergency room of fictional County General Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. It was produced by Constant c Productions and Amblin Entertainment in association with Warner Bros. Television Production, Inc. The show ran for 15 seasons, becoming the longest-running medical drama in American primetime television history.It won 22 Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Drama Series (1996), and received 123 Emmy nominations, the most of any television show in history.
In 1974, author Michael Crichton wrote a screenplay based on his own experiences as a medical resident in a busy hospital emergency room. The screenplay went nowhere, and Crichton focused on other topics. In 1990, he published the novel Jurassic Park, and in 1993 began a collaboration with director Steven Spielberg on the film adaptation of that. The Crichton-Spielberg team then returned to ER but decided to film the story as a two-hour pilot for a television series rather than as a feature film. Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment provided John Wells as the show's executive producer. The script used to shoot the pilot was virtually unchanged from what Crichton had written in 1974. The only substantive changes made by the producers in 1994 made the Susan Lewis character a woman and the Peter Benton character an African-American, and shortened the running time by about 20 minutes in order for the pilot to air in a two-hour block on network TV. Due to a lack of time and money to build a set, the pilot episode of ER was filmed in the former Linda Vista Community Hospital in Los Angeles, an old facility that ceased operating as a medical center in 1990.A set modeled after Los Angeles County General Hospital's emergency room was built soon afterwards at the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California, although the show makes extensive use of location shoots in Chicago, most notably the city's famous "L" train platforms.
In 1974, author Michael Crichton wrote a screenplay based on his own experiences as a medical resident in a busy hospital emergency room. The screenplay went nowhere, and Crichton focused on other topics. In 1990, he published the novel Jurassic Park, and in 1993 began a collaboration with director Steven Spielberg on the film adaptation of that. The Crichton-Spielberg team then returned to ER but decided to film the story as a two-hour pilot for a television series rather than as a feature film. Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment provided John Wells as the show's executive producer. The script used to shoot the pilot was virtually unchanged from what Crichton had written in 1974. The only substantive changes made by the producers in 1994 made the Susan Lewis character a woman and the Peter Benton character an African-American, and shortened the running time by about 20 minutes in order for the pilot to air in a two-hour block on network TV. Due to a lack of time and money to build a set, the pilot episode of ER was filmed in the former Linda Vista Community Hospital in Los Angeles, an old facility that ceased operating as a medical center in 1990.A set modeled after Los Angeles County General Hospital's emergency room was built soon afterwards at the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California, although the show makes extensive use of location shoots in Chicago, most notably the city's famous "L" train platforms.