ER is coming to Netflix – and it's time we recognised it changed television forever

We all have an example of a TV show like this, right? The one that holds an outsized importance in our affections? For me, it’s undoubtedly and wholeheartedly ER, the 15 seasons of which are coming to Netflix in the UK on 9 February.

It’s a method of accessing the series that would have been inconceivable to the undergraduate version of myself who, back in the mid-1990s, was watching on a 14-inch portable TV with his girlfriend in manky digs.

It felt, at the time, like an impossibly sophisticated drama. All that frantic talk of Chem-7s, CBCs, Coags, EKGs being clean or otherwise. No real idea what any of it meant, but it sure seemed as though we were eavesdropping on the way things truly worked at the sharp end of hospital life.

And the acts of heroism on display, such as reckless Doug Ross (George Clooney) risking all to rescue a boy trapped in a storm drain as the rain waters rose. It felt filmic, almost mythic. Well, as much as anything can on a tiny, boxy Sony without Nicam Stereo.

For the two of us, ER had staying power. We, like the nebbishy and lovable Dr Carter (Noah Wyle) were students when it began. But when it ended, a decade and a half later, we were bringing our second-born son home from hospital. Those real-life births, incidentally, made all-the-more fraught by us having witnessed on TV every late-stage pregnancy complication known to the medical profession.

But such awareness mattered not. Each winter, we’ll still watch season one’s Blizzard because nothing says Christmas like a multi-car pile-up in the snow. And every festive season, we’ll tell our now-grown-up kids just how much ER meant to us when we were their age. They’ll smile indulgently for a second or two and then go back to thinking of us as they ordinarily do. As index fingers with a banking app attached.

Yet a not insubstantial part of me is hoping that they’ll now somehow come to ER via streaming. In a Gen Z epiphany, they’ll abandon Grand Theft Auto and IShowSpeed and realise instead that kindly Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards) can be as much a hero to their generation as ours.

Because despite us merely dusting down the odd tinselly episode on an annual basis, ER is not just for Christmas. In fact, it ought to be given its due more vocally in general, especially by critics who believe the most recent golden age of TV dawned with the debut of The Sopranos in 1999.

Spool back to 1994 and the birth of ER and you’ll find the true start of what’s now categorised prestige television. Before this time, dialogue had overlapped and morals had been compromised (Hill Street Blues), there’d been tonal ambiguity and attempts to make TV as art (Twin Peaks), even depictions of doctors as burnouts rather than paragons of virtue (St Elsewhere). But ER achieved what those others didn’t in being ambitious, serious, influential but also massively popular.

Just think about it. Hill Street Blues was a critical darling, but its hold over audiences was never as strong. St Elsewhere had the ethical quandaries yet lacked the accelerative thrust. And Twin Peaks featured serialised storytelling of a type we’d rarely seen outside of soaps, but its surreal tone led to it being constrained by network interference.

ER, on the other hand, could produce such devastating hours of TV as Love’s Labor Lost (in which Greene tragically misdiagnosed a pregnant patient – a mistake that would haunt him for the rest of his career), win Emmy awards for the results and still top the Nielsen ratings. And yet it’s never really spoken of in the same glowing terms as the Breaking Bads or The Wires of this world. Why?

Perhaps its home on US network NBC rather than cable channel HBO has resulted in it now being overlooked? Did its increasingly grandiose set-piece stunts do it more harm than good (certainly, Dr Romano didn’t fare well from his two fateful encounters with helicopters)? Maybe the fact that it ended its run with a completely different regular cast to its original line-up has led to accusations that it outstayed its welcome?

But watch its finale And In the End... and you’ll see how just effectively ER stayed thematically true to itself. Patients keep arriving on gurneys, while doctors continue to heal and teach. And making a return to Chicago’s Cook County General in its last on-screen appearance is Carter, once a callow trainee, now a seasoned mentor and someone passing on his wisdom in an unshowy manner to Mark’s daughter Rachel, these days a wannabe medic herself.

“Dr Greene, you coming?” Carter asks as ambulances pull up to the bay and the cameras pan out. It’s the most beautiful piece of narrative symmetry: the shifts continue, as do the lessons, and characters are shown to matter because of what they hand down to the next generation.

ER set that tone in 1994 and held its nerve until 2009. In fact, the only way it could have been more perfect would be for it to have aired solely on crummy, small portable TV sets.

ER is coming to Netflix UK on Monday 9 February 2026.

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