The Guide #156: Why ER still gets my heart racing

This week I’ve spent a good chunk of my downtime rewatching Industry, BBC and HBO’s high-tension, high-finance drama, which returns for a third series in the UK on 1 October (American viewers are already charging through it). Watching it a second time, is just as intense as a first: the pace, the jargon-filled crosstalk, the queasy, quick-cut camerawork … I’ve never had a speedball, but this seems like the televisual approximation of what taking one might feel like.

Another show I’ve been revisiting this week is ER. Not, alas, because there’s another season coming but because the medical drama celebrates its 30th birthday this month, and that seemed excuse enough to dive back in. And, rewatching the first series, what struck me was just how much like Industry it seemed.

ER still goes hard , each episode rattling along like a gurney down a hospital corridor. It’s remarkable to watch, Steadicams swooping in and around its harried doctors, nurses and surgeons. Its verité visual style continues to be mimicked across TV . And the show is thick with detail: not just in the density of the medical language, but also in the sheer number of plotlines being juggled in each episode. That was something that bewildered many viewers and critics in 1994, but the willingness to zip between stories seems a lot more suited to our attention-deficit age. For all the 90s-ness of the thing – the references, the decor, the clothing, the pea-soupy picture quality – the show still feels thrillingly modern .

ER’s relative sprightliness got me thinking about how TV shows age, or not. How many times have you watched a show from the not-so-distant past, even a show that you enjoyed first time around, and thought, “Wow, this looks dated”? It happens to me quite a bit and it’s not always simply down to a show’s age. When we talk of things being “dated”, we often mean in material terms: it’s easy to mock a show for its outmoded fashions or technology. More interesting, I think, is when a show feels dated because of how it tells a story or even what story it tells.

Take Cheers. It’s a show that ended just a year before ER started, but seems beamed in from another century. I should note that I love Cheers, a show that represents a high-water mark for the sitcom with compelling characters, beautifully constructed jokes and that feeling of warm, enveloping familiarity that all the best sitcoms should have. That said, have you watched it lately?! It feels static and stagey, closer to a Victorian drawing room comedy than the quick-cutting single-cam sitcoms of today.

On the other hand, Friends, Cheers’s sitcom successor on US network NBC, seems to have somehow avoided the ageing process as well as its regular guest star Paul Rudd (a few unfortunate elements aside), and it’s watched as avidly by gen Z as by its original audience. Friends’s agelessness might have something to do with its studied inoffensiveness: it largely avoided any sort of real specificity, conjuring up a fantasy version of New York that bears little relation to what was actually going on in the city (ballooning rents, Rudy Giuliani’s crime crackdown and, of course, 9/11) at the time it aired – allowing different generations and demographics to project themselves on to it.

In fact, being of the moment is often what dooms TV to seeming dated further down the line. I recently revisited Nathan Barley – Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris’s bracing 2005 satire on the creeping hipsterisation of east London – expecting it to feel completely fresh. After all, this was the show considered ahead of its time, “a documentary about the future” as a Guardian 10th anniversary piece noting its prescience put it. Yet another 10 years on from that piece, Brooker and Morris’s show (pictured above), while still extremely funny, seems, to my eyes at least, strangely outmoded in look – hot-pink patterned T-shirts and angular haircuts – and feel. Watching it is like viewing Pathé footage of a war that’s long since ended – in this case, against the shallow provocation of early hipsterdom. It’s essentially one long screed against the gleeful offensiveness of 00s-era Vice magazine and its acolytes. That was a battle worth fighting at the time, but it feels a little out of step with today’s more cautious mood, when gleeful offensiveness is somewhat rarer on the ground.

In truth, it’s a little unfair to hold past generations’ shows to today’s standards. After all, they were being made for their own time, not for the approval of some future audience. The advent of streaming has meant that, where once you would have had to seek out older programmes on VHS and DVD, now you can stumble upon them, nestled alongside newer series. And let’s remember that a lot of the shows mentioned here have stood the test of time, by virtue of the fact that we’re still watching them: the shows that feel truly outdated, or even downright offensive (see about 50% of all British sitcoms made in the 1970s ), are unlikely to ever resurface on iPlayer or Netflix at all.

It will be interesting to see how a show like Industry dates or doesn’t date, though. It’s a show that is happy to tackle of-the-moment topics: unlike other series (notably Succession) it knitted the pandemic and its after-effects into its second series, and its third series will tackle how business is embracing – or pretending to embrace – green energy and environmental, social and governance principles. For contemporary audiences, this patina of realness is part of what makes Industry so compelling, but that same quality may be what makes it feel out of step in the future. Or maybe not. Maybe, like ER, it will still give that gurney down the hallway rush.

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