Wow, ‘ER’ Is Harrowing To Watch As An Adult!

Y’all, ER was my jam back in the day. I spent every Thursday night for nine seasons parked in a UT Vols bean bag chair mere feet from the TV while George Clooney and Julianna Margulies and Noah Wyle and Alex Kingston and a hundred more doctors saved lives (and also did not save lives). The show was fast-paced, way more frenetic than any show on TV, and it threw you into the deep end as blood sprayed and actors volleyed medical jargon around. I loved it, every week, and for years I have ached to rewatch the show now that we’re in the age of streaming.

Hulu, ever my beloved, granted my wish last weekend and crammed all 15 seasons into its library (yes, even the ones with John Stamos!). I hit “play” ASAP, ready to let the funky, muzak jazz theme song wash over me for the first time in a dozen years. I just didn’t realize one major thing has changed since I was obsessed with ER: I’ve grown up.

ER debuted when I was in the 5th grade, meaning I was regularly watching overdoses and panicked blood transfusions and pregnancy complications at the age of 10. I continued to watch ER every single week from 5th grade through my freshman year of college. That’s a long time, yeah, but I had not yet lived a life despite what my surely self-important 18-year-old inner monologue regularly claimed. I still lived with my parents, even! I had no context for the true horror of ER.

At 33, I do. Oh, boy, I do.

Rewatching ER as an adult was way more of an intense emotional experience than I ever imagined. I honestly thought that the decades would have dulled the show, slowed its pace and lessened its drama. Nope! It turns out that watching the show as an adult–a married man, one who has lost loved ones, one who dealt with insurance headaches, one who has fretted about illnesses, one terrified of death–is a horrifying experience. The show pushes brain buttons I didn’t even know I had when I first watched this show in elementary school. I now get ER on a higher level, and it makes me wonder if adults in the ’90s were just absolutely wrecked by this show every week.

ER is a show where dozens of sometimes nameless bodies are wheeled in on a gurney to the sound of angry bongo drums and a bunch of doctors and nurses shout at each other while scrambling to keep all of this body’s blood and organs on the inside. There are also slower stories, where we get to know a patient’s name and, usually, the name of the tear-soaked spouse that death is ripping them away from. Sometimes you get multi-episode arcs where the family members of the main cast fall into substance abuse or put our heroes through paternity test hell. And then sometimes our heroes, the doctors themselves, are brutally stabbed and you watch all of their co-workers–their found family–try and fail to save them.

ER fans, this is where I was going to put a screengrab from that storyline, but just watching that one moment where Dr. Carter discovers the body–even watching it out of context!–set a wave of panic, fear, and dread rippling across my body. I can’t do that to you. That screengrab has been deleted.

I get that I may have made a mistake by choosing to watch all of the main cast members’ goodbye episodes first (I made it through Eriq La Salle’s and I am just not at all emotionally equipped to watch Anthony Edwards’ yet). But aside from that aforementioned bloody upsetting goodbye, those episodes’ main storylines were relatively easy to get through. It was the side stories, as patients say goodbye to dying parents or dying spouses, that wrecked me. I have never been more acutely aware that death is eventually going to separate me and my husband than I was during this Hulu streaming season.

But it’s not just the goodbye episodes, either. I haven’t rewatched the Emmy-winning (and memorably devastating) “Love’s Labor Lost,” or “Night-Shift,” a tonal precursor to that horrifying episode I keep alluding to. But you know what other ER episodes I did watch? I watched Bob Newhart’s three–part stint as a man losing his eyesight who befriends Dr. Susan Lewis (Sherry Stringfield)! I love Bob! I knew this rewatch would be fun!

Oh, right, ER makes Bob Newhart put a gun to his head and blow out his button-down mind. GREAT.

I did not expect to have this visceral of a reaction to a nearly 25-year-old show, but here we are. It’s a testament to the show’s power and its relevance (a relevance threatened by languishing in cable reruns forever while the new kids are all streaming). As an example of just how brutal a story can feel when it’s done well, ER honestly can’t be beat. It is absolutely a show worth watching for the first time, especially if you were born sometime in the last 20 years.

To the rest of my ER youths-turned-olds, remember that adults in the ’90s only had to deal with one ER a week and keep that in mind when you log into Hulu.

Where to stream ER