TV: Suspense could kill ER's drama

By FIONA RAE

The three most excruciating words in the television lexicon: to be continued. They were implicit at the end of last week's gripping episode of ER (TV2, 8.30 pm), which left two key characters stabbed and dying on a cold examination room floor while the rest of the staff partied.

The Herald can, not very exclusively, reveal that one of the pair - John Carter or Lucy Knight - dies tonight. It will be tragic and awful and affecting. There will be resuscitations ("clear!") and heroic measures. It will be torture for the one left behind. There will be big ratings.

The episode, All in the Family, was huge in the United States for the medical drama, giving it the highest ratings for any regular show since the final of Seinfeld.

But it had to come to this: the sudden stabbing of two core characters. For a show that has always been darn good at the interweaving storyline and the slow build-up, a double stabbing is sadly cynical.

Small things used to be important. Asides would have meaning later, worried frowns or messages on the phone weren't immediately explained. Character development took almost as long as the real thing. Even the famous emergency-room scenes, with cameras swirling and drums throbbing, were important for how the characters coped.

But these days they just do it. This season has been too much, too fast. There are so many new characters that no one's getting a look-in.

It's like a snatched conversation rather than a long love letter.

So far we've had Gabriel Lawrence (Alan Alda), Luka Kovic (a kind of Croatian George Clooney played by Goran Visnjic), Cleo Finch (Michael Michele), Dave Malucci (Erik Palladino), Deb Chen (Ming-Na) and Abby Lockhart (Maura Tierney).

And old characters have been doing things that are out of character: since when did sensitive, selfless Carter become such a grump? Why would he throw away his professionalism just to be grouchy with Lucy?

The producers have admitted that they had to spend a lot of time last season working George Clooney off the show and then building new characters. Trouble is, they've left so much hanging, they're damned by their own design. It was always an ensemble, now there are too many characters, not enough time.

But still, we're loyal. ER has had a grand tradition of not talking down to its audience. At the beginning way back in 1994, the show's makers fought to retain the medical jargon, saying audiences would catch up - and we have.

It has brought cinema-verite and multiple, interwoven storylines to the small screen, updated the medical drama (like The Sopranos, there's no going back to the old style) and brilliantly tapped into the Western world's health obsession.

Actually, tonight's death in the emergency room does have a context. The American television system creates the best and the worst and is viciously overt about what's important: ratings.

The stabbings happened during what's known as "February sweeps" in the United States. Last week, during May sweeps, nurse Carol Hathaway made a tearful exit from the emergency room into the arms of Doug Ross - yes, there was a glimpse of George Clooney. It was huge for NBC, which is in a battle for the top spot with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

But if ER has to play that particular reactive ratings game - leading when it should be following - it may not last out the contract it has just signed until 2004.