ER Checks Out Tonight

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.”

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