There's no shortage of hit medical dramas in the history of television and the 2024 TV schedule, but ER remains one of the most iconic more than fifteen years after its series finale. As with many former hit shows, there has been speculation about whether ER could be revived, and original series star Noah Wyle recently confirmed that such conversations did happen. While fans won't be getting an ER 2.0, the actor's comments reminded me of what the drama's costume designer told us earlier this year.
There Was Interest In An ER Revival
Noah Wyle played Dr. John Carter for most of ER's fifteen seasons on NBC, and remains best known for the role despite expanding into projects like The Librarians and CBS' The Red Line. While on the Still Here Hollywood podcast, Wyle recounted how hearing from first responders during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted him to reach out to executive producer John Wells because he "wanted to say thanks." Wyle then explained:
Then I went on and I said, ‘I know you don’t want to reboot the show. I don’t either. I thought it was very smart not to franchise and dilute what we did, but if you ever wanted to do something much smaller, and much more contained, more of a character piece catching up to an old character and just finding out how they feel about what’s happening right now in healthcare, and use them as a jeremiad opportunity to say what you want, I would vote for that. I would be on board for that.’
The talks evidently expanded beyond Wyle and Wells to include former ER writers R. Scott Gemmill and David Zabel, resulting in a "concept" that never "got out of the starting gate" due to "some issues" and stalled negotiations. So, an updated version of ER never got out of the conversation stage, but those talks did result in a brand new project for Wyle, Wells, and Gemmill, with Gemmill coming off of the 14-year run of NCIS: LA.
A new TV show called The Pitt will reunite the three ER veterans for Max subscribers, with Noah Wyle starring and executive producing the new medical drama set in Pittsburgh, with a focus on the challenges facing workers who are on the front lines of health care. When Max broke the news of the project, Gemmill was listed as showrunner while Wells will executive produce.
And the news of a new show reuniting these former ER talents after an ER revival stalled prompted me to think back to a conversation with the medical drama's costume designer from earlier in 2024.
What The Costume Designer Told Us
ER was a complicated show to work on, and all the effort behind the scenes is why it still stands the test of time today. Even if plenty about the first season might seem dating for any first-timers checking out the show circa 2024 with a Hulu subscription, the production value was always high, the pace was always fast, and the crises at County General in Chicago were plentiful. The challenges of the show extended to wardrobe, as costume designer Lyn Paolo told CinemaBlend at SCAD TVfest:
That show was actually one of the hardest shows I've ever done, because the thing that used to make me feel sad was people would say, 'What do you do all day? They're wearing scrubs.' And it wasn't until later on that I realized that my director said, 'Lyn, they think it's real. They don't understand that every single person that comes through those doors – like a hockey player with injury on ice or mother of five with her injuries – we had to tell who they were in five to six seconds of them coming in on the gurney.' It was fast-paced [with] hundreds of extras every day, dealing with the blood, multiples.
"Multiples" refers to the costume designer needing multiple versions of each item of clothing on a character, which is easy to understand in hindsight but also not hard to miss back when ER was originally airing in the '90s as a one-of-a-kind primetime drama. The costume designer continued:
I think it's the show that I spent the most money on because we destroyed everything. We'd be cutting up the clothes. It was a challenging show because for everything that we bought, we got a multiple of six or seven of everything that the person was wearing, including underwear. But then we have to age everything to make it look so it wasn't new. You couldn't put brand new clothes on people. It would be damaged in some way from whatever accident they've been in so there was a lot of very fine detail work on that show.
I may never view an episode of ER quite the same way after hearing the challenges summarized from the costume designer's point of view. Everything had to be destroyed in just the right way, and also somehow match. Our conversation actually had me flashing back to Season 6, when – spoiler alert – Carter was brutally stabbed, meaning that Noah Wyle's wardrobe undoubtedly needed more multiple's than usual.
Fortunately, it's not hard to revisit the heyday of ER. All fifteen seasons of the show – which ran from 1994-2009 – are currently available streaming via Hulu.
