25 Things You Never Knew About ER

Carol Hathaway’s suicide attempt in the pilot is a shocking and abrupt twist, but in the original version of the episode it was also supposed to be fatal. Test audiences responded so positively to Carol that this idea was scrapped, and so although Margulies is credited as a guest star for the first episode, she went on to become one of the show’s most beloved and pivotal regular characters.

The show earned a total of 124 Emmy nominations across its 15 season run, and won 22 of them, including the Outstanding Drama Series award for season 2, and a Best Supporting Actress award for Margulies in season 1. More performers on this show have received Emmy nominations—across the lead, supporting, and guest actor categories—than for any other series.

Eriq La Salle and Alex Kingston had insane chemistry, and a lot of fans were disappointed when their characters’ romance was cut short. But La Salle asked producers to end the relationship because he was uneasy with the fact that Benton’s romance with Corday, a white woman, was depicted so much more positively than his previous relationships with two black women in the show (Gloria Reuben’s Jeanie and Lisa Nicole Carson’s Carla). “As an African American man, it becomes a bit offensive if the negative things are all you’re showing,” he said. “Because in real life, we romance and get on each other’s nerves and laugh and do all the things that any other race of people do.”

Steven Spielberg was set to direct the original big-screen version of ER, which Michael Crichton wrote as “a documentary-style movie about what happened during 24 hours in an emergency room.” Nobody would make the film, finding it too “technical, too chaotic and too fast-moving,” per Crichton, and so the script was shelved for two decades until NBC came along.

Despite the fact that the feature script for ER had sat on the shelf for so long by the time it made it to television in 1994, what ended up being filmed was almost word-for-word Crichton’s original screenplay from 1974. One very significant change, though, was in casting, because Crichton’s script centered on five white, male doctors, so Dr Lewis became a woman and Dr Benton became a black man.

The addition of the basketball hoop outside the ambulance bay at County General ended up creating a key new location for the show, but originally, George Clooney had the idea simply because he liked to shoot a few hoops to unwind between takes. He asked for the hoop to be installed on the Burbank studio lot, but it ended up in an area where it could be picked up by the camera, and so it was incorporated into the show.

Both shows were part of NBC’s wildly successful Thursday night lineup in the mid-'90s, and the network took advantage by having Clooney and Wyle make an appearance as doctors in the first season of Friends, in the episode where Rachel switches identities with Monica to use her health insurance. Though it’s not a real crossover—ER is set in Chicago while Friends is in New York—it was a nice tidbit for fans of both shows. There are several other subtle Friends easter eggs buried through the show; David Schwimmer plays a doctor in the season three premiere, though his face is never seen, and Dr Greene’s daughter’s name is Rachel Greene—one letter away from the Friends character Rachel Green.

Some of the time, that is. Though the interiors of the show were filmed at the Warner Bros studio in Burbank, California, filming would move to Chicago a couple of times each season. During these visits, enough exterior scenes would be shot for several episodes, encompassing familiar Chicago landmarks like the “L” rapid transit system and the Michigan Avenue Bridge.

Producers were keen for Carol to make the change from nurse to doctor, and the character is shown seriously considering the possibility in season three, even taking the med school entrance exam. But Margulies objected, on the grounds that Carol had always been so proud of being a nurse that the change felt out of character for her. Several seasons later, Maura Tierney’s character Abby did become a doctor after being a nurse.

But the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike cut the episode count down so much that the producers knew they wouldn’t have long enough to give the show a full send-off. For that reason, NBC agreed to bring ER back for a fifteenth and final season, which ran from September 2008 through to April 2009.

Both appeared in 13 out of 15 seasons. Wyle’s Dr Carter was a series regular from the beginning of season 1 until season 11's finale, but he returned for several episodes in season 12 and in season 15. Innes’ Dr Weaver first appeared in season 2, and remained as a regular until midway through season 13, then returned for a handful of season 15 episodes. Both actors returned for the series finale.

ER’s writers visited a number of hospitals in the Los Angeles area to get inspiration for new medical storylines, and would often adapt real events with a slightly more dramatic twist. An episode in which a baby has a coat hanger stuck in its throat was inspired by a real incident, but in the show the baby was much more severely injured and needed a tracheotomy—in real life, the doctors were able to simply remove the coat hanger.

Dr Carter got involved with plenty of co-workers throughout his time on the show, but there was one relationship that Wyle objected to. Producers wanted to pair Carter with medical student Lucy Knight (Kellie Martin), but Wyle (understandably) felt it would be out of character and inappropriate for Carter to date a subordinate.

Hard though it is to imagine now, executive producer John Wells said Clooney “begged [him] for a part.” At that time, Clooney was 33 and still in search of his breakout role. "Our second day in the office, George showed up and wouldn't leave until I'd let him audition,” Wells recalled. “George got his hands on the material and was like a dog with a bone."

Wyle fell sick with mono during the filming of season 1’s memorably devastating "Love’s Labor Lost," and was so unwell that the on-set medical technician put him on an IV, and he shot his scenes with a bag of saline in his pocket.

In season 11, Dr Weaver undergoes a surgery for her congenital hip dysplasia to eliminate her limp. This was because Innes had developed back problems after a decade of playing Weaver with a cane. “My real back was getting screwed up,” she said. “I got a bone density test and the bottom of my spine is starting to curve on one side from ten years of raising my hip.”