YMMV / ER

• Actor Shipping: George Clooney and Julianna Margulies, aka Super Couple Doug and Carol. The two burst out laughing when asked if they were dating in Real Life, but years after the show ended, admitted that they'd been attracted to each other throughout their time on the show and that to this day (they've remained good friends), they use their characters names as pet names for each other. ^note  It was Clooney who advised Marguiles not to take another acting job because he'd overheard TPTB debating reviving Carol. Marguiles has outright said that she owes her career to him thanks to taking his advice.
• Alas, Poor Scrappy: The character of Lucy Knight was killed off because the producers and Kellie Martin both agreed that she wasn't working, being more of a Cousin Oliver. However, when she was murdered by a schizophrenic patient in Season 6, the characters were sad and audience reaction was "Okay, you didn't have to go that far!"
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Was Dave Malucci really a bad doctor and person? Despite his arrogance and periodic jerkass moments, in the rare moments when he was dealing with a patient by himself, or when he was able to realize the concurrent situation was deadly serious, he could perform his duties surprisingly well and toned down his attitude. He also seemed to genuinely care about his patients, even if he didn't know how to handle his emotional reactions, ie: trying to beat up the father of a little girl who confided in him that her father was sexually abusing her. While he definitely should have kept his cool and followed procedure, he was the only doctor who could get the poor girl to open up. And there are a number of other examples where he showed his care for patients, including risking his own life to gather evidence for the cops to bust some drug dealers who were preying on a hospitalized Hispanic couple. Even on his final day in the ER he points out to Weaver as she is attempting to fire him that he made six saves that day, and she can't refute him. Still, no one ever had anything good to say about him, and even most fans tended only to see him as a total idiot.
  • By contrast, Dr. Kovac was always seen as the pinnacle of the medical profession, and even though his irresponsible decisions and behavior were correctly called out when they happened, people continued to act as if he was a great doctor. Then there was the fact that a majority of his patients tended to die. This was mainly Rule of Drama, but still, after the fiftieth patient dies in his care, how great a doctor can he be?
  • In later seasons, Carter was always credited with being the main teacher of the show's younger doctors, much as Greene was during his run. In the Season 8 episode "Orion in the Sky," Carter repeats to Gallant the same advice Greene gave on Carter's first day in the ER; the entire scene is a shot-for-shot remake of the original scene from Season 1. But while Carter imparts a few lessons to Pratt in Season 9, his relationships with other characters are rarely about teaching or mentorship. By Season 10, he's shuffling back and forth to Africa and not terribly involved with medical education anyways.
  • The true successor to Greene in this regard turns out to be, in a nice bit of character development, Kovac. In Season 9, he nearly gets a medical student killed and tells Gallant he's not respected enough in the hospital for his recommendation to mean anything. In the front half of Season 10, he clashes so terribly with Pratt after returning from Africa that Pratt vows to never present a case to him again. But in Season 11 and onward, he's repeatedly shown teaching students, taking an interest in their learning, and developing a good rapport with them—and by Season 14, Pratt warmly refers to Kovac as "my old mentor."
  • Was Benton really the Jerk with a Heart of Gold the fandom seems to think he is, or was he really just an arrogant, cocky surgeon who had a temper problem and couldn't take any kind of criticism? He has a few soft moments, sure, but he was downright cruel to Jeanie, drove Dennis Gant to suicide, and seemed to think that he had nothing left to learn even when he was still a resident.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: When this show premiered, it was going up against Chicago Hope. While not deriding E.R., most critics deemed Hope the better show and predicted that it would win the ratings battle. Only for E.R. to trounce Hope so thoroughly that within weeks, Hope shifted its timeslot and was off the air within six seasons (perfectly respectable, but nowhere near E.R.'s 15).
• Angst? What Angst?:
  • Sam is kidnapped by her ex-husband, witnesses him murder his two cohorts, is raped by him, shoots him in what's more-or-less self-defense...and is completely over it by the end of the next episode after the DA decides not to press charges.
  • In fact, a good chunk of characters who went through some kind of trauma got over it pretty quickly.
• Anvilicious:
  • Viewers often complained about this in the show's later seasons, noting that characters grappling with a personal issue would always find themselves treating a patient who was also dealing with it, and that said patient would end up giving them some insight on how to handle it (or not handle it).
  • Even in earlier seasons, the show would waste no time in talking about how inefficient the American healthcare system is, how corrupt the pharmaceutical industry is and how honest doctors only work with them because there's no other option, and so on.
  • The Doctors Without Borders arc, comprising the Season 9 finale and decent chunks of 10 and 11, was considered an excuse for the writers to pontificate about how badly the US treats developing countries, views usually put in the mouth of Carter's Congolese girlfriend Kem (Thandiwe Newton). Alex Kingston commented in a post-series interview that the cast was seriously aggravated by this storyline, and even showrunner John Wells (who personally wrote many of the episodes in question) came to regret the arc as anvilicious.
• Award Snub: The only regular cast member to win an Emmy Award was Julianna Margulies, and she only won once. Anthony Edwards, George Clooney, Sherry Stringfield, Noah Wyle, Eriq La Salle, Gloria Reuben, Laura Innes, C.C.H. Pounder and Maura Tierney all received at least one nomination for Outstanding Lead or Supporting Actor/Actress, but all went home empty-handed. Alex Kingston, Paul McCrane, Goran Višnjić, Mekhi Phifer, Parminder Nagra and Linda Cardellini were never even nominated despite earning critical acclaim and audience appreciation.
• Awesome Music:
  • A trope-savvy Carter gleefully plays "Ride of the Valkyries" when he gets the chance to take out Benton's appendix. At the end of the surgery "Mack the Knife" can be heard.
  • The main theme was composed by the composer actually spending a day wandering around a hospital and taking inspiration from all the various sounds he heard. If you listen you can pick out the beeping of machines, rattle of gurneys, and beating of a heart.
  • Just about every piece in "Hell and High Water". In particular, the climax at the point where Doug emerges from the lake with the boy in his arms.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Abby Lockhart. Initially very well-received, and Maura Tierney gave a great performance, but as the show went on (particularly once she went back to med school in Season 10), many viewers became divided between those who still loved her and those who could no longer stand her. Despite Abby's oftentimes sullen mood and abrasive behaviour, patients and their loved ones tended to bond with her, and during her rotations in med school she was told on several occasions that she was a natural at different specialties (neo-natal and psych come to mind). This, coupled with her getting a lot of screen time and a lot of episodes named after her, made her hard to stomach for many viewers, and many felt she was starting to exhibit Mary Sue tendencies or that she was a Creator's Pet. However, for many viewers she remained their favourite character throughout her tenure on the show, and found her story lines engaging. Others still love her in her early seasons on the show and dislike her in the later seasons.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • A handful of characters, scenes, and storylines can count as this. Such as the infamous "Amanda Lee" story, which had a deranged woman posing as a doctor hired as the ER chief. When her ruse is discovered, she flees the hospital...and that's it. No mention of the massive public and professional embarrassment and lawsuits any health care facility would surely face after such a fiasco.
  • One of Carol's patients is heavily implied to be Santa Claus. He ends up mysteriously disappearing from the hospital, which should result in an investigation and missing man search, but all it does is cause Carol to wonder "could it be TRUE??!?!" and never mention it again.
  • In Season 8, Carter reveals he lost his virginity at age 11. To a 25 year old maid. This ought to be seriously alarming, but nobody raises any alarm at the time, and it's never mentioned again.
• Complete Monster:
  • "Do You See What I See?" through "Carter's Choice": Jack Miller (only appearing in "Carter's Choice") is a young Serial Rapist who preys on elderly women, who he brutally beats before sexually assaulting them, afterward using a marker to brand the victims with the word "WHORE". Jack's first known victim is 67-year-old Mrs. Larkin, with the second being a dementia sufferer named Ann. The third victim dies from her injuries, while the fourth one—who had "WHORE" carved directly into her flesh—nearly dies from wounds sustained from being strangled and thrown down a flight of stairs while trying to fight off Jack. Jack guns down a security guard who had interrupted his attack on the fourth victim, and is finally arrested after being shot during a standoff with the Chicago PD.
  • "Humpty Dumpty" through "The Domino Heart": Dean Rollins initially appears to just be a run-of-the-mill accident victim, but is soon discovered to be a vicious Serial Killer. While being treated for life-threatening injuries, Dean is forced by Doctor Lizzie Corday to reveal the whereabouts of his latest victim, Sandra. Sandra, who was raped and stabbed, dies while being treated at Cook County, with Dean proceeding to mock Lizzie over how his confession being coerced means that it had to be thrown out by the DA. He goes on to demean Lizzie by getting her to say that she cares about him "as a woman" in exchange for agreeing to undergo a lifesaving surgery, and later has her bring him Lindsey, the sister of a victim named Jenny, by falsely promising to reveal the whereabouts of Jenny's remains to Lindsey. He feigns sympathy for Lindsey, and then taunts her by saying, "If only I'd met you... I could've had you instead!" Eventually growing weary of being bedridden and largely powerless as he awaits his trial, Dean tries one final time to exercise control over Lizzie by attempting to coerce her into breaking her Hippocratic Oath by euthanizing him in exchange for information about Jenny.
  • "Where the Heart Is" & "Rampage": Derek Fossen is a temperamental man who once beat his girlfriend, and is now abusing his young son, Ben. After Ben is taken by social services at the behest of Doctor Mark Greene, Derek snaps and goes on a shooting rampage through Chicago in search of his son, while also attacking everyone who he blames for him losing custody of Ben. Derek shoots up a foster care facility full of children, guns a man down for his car, and opens fire on his neighbor and her son before running over a member of the Chicago PD. Derek makes a failed bid to murder Mark's family and shoots five more people before being wounded by a bystander and taken to Cook County, where he is allowed to die from his injuries by an enraged Mark.
• Crack Pairing: Fanfic writers thoroughly enjoy this one:
  • Several writers have a knack for pairing mortal enemies and polar opposites Doug Ross and Kerry Weaver, choosing to interpret their numerous clashes as Belligerent Sexual Tension and/or leftover bad feelings from a failed relationship. It doesn't—or perhaps it does—help that Laura Innes did in fact audition for the role of one of Doug's girlfriends before being cast as Kerry.
  • Another series of fanfics titled "Carter Does County" was...Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Thanks to this, pairings included those who he genuinely did have Unresolved Sexual Tension with, while others made no sense given their lack of interaction and/or that they were homosexual pairings between characters who were straight.
  • ER fanfic had plenty of slash pairings that resulted in this. Along with pairing heterosexual characters, the one main character who was gay (Kerry), was often paired with women who were straight and/or hated her.
  • The fic "The Eternal Quadrangle" was legendary for this, taking four characters (Kerry, Abby, Luka, Carter) and pairing each of them with the other three at various intervals, interspersing the story with varying versions of twosomes, threesomes, and finally concluding it with a foursome. Also paired with Hilarious in Hindsight, as Abby did hook up with Luka and Carter at different times throughout the show.
• Creator's Pet: Shortly after joining the show, Maura Tierney's character Abby Lockhart became its central figure, with many episodes focused on her and her miserable life—an unfaithful ex (and other dysfunctional relationships), mentally ill mother and brother, career troubles, alcoholism. Abby was always portrayed as the innocent victim in these situations, even though later dialogue revealed that she was just as responsible for the failure of her relationships as her vilified partners.
• Critical Dissonance: Some of the reviews for the show when it premiered weren't too flattering, calling the personal storylines hackneyed. Obviously, viewers disagreed. Critics also lambasted the live episode—which is one of the series highest rated.
• Designated Hero: Mark Greene, who from the very first episode was pushed as the "heart" of the show. Said "heart" was not always there for his friends when they needed him and went through several spates of being a jerk due to plot events that he never apologised for.
• Designated Villain:
  • The man who shot the psycho who was rampaging around the city killing people with the intent of getting to Greene's family. Keep in mind said psycho had already shot this guy before he pulled a gun of his own and shot back. But just to assure us that guns are evil and anyone who would use one is a Jerkass at best, he's smug over his "kill" and Carter lectures him on how it's pure luck he didn't shoot a baby or something.
  • Conversely the cops complain that he didn't do a good enough job, noting that he shot the guy five times and he still survived, and claiming that if the police had caught up with him, he'd be in the morgue instead. Which kind of takes things into Kick the Dog territory, given how hard it is to hit a moving target at distance even when you've not just been shot, and it's hardly the guy's fault that the psycho was too tough to die after being hit by five bullets.
  • Roger McGrath, stepfather to Peter Benton's son Reese. When Carla, Peter's ex and Roger's wife, dies in a car accident, Roger sues Peter for custody. We're supposed to side with Peter, despite the fact that he has very few arguments as to why he would be a better father beyond First Father Wins, and at one point forces his current girlfriend, Dr. Cleo Finch, to commit perjury to help his case.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • Something is definitely off about Chloe Lewis, given her massive self-indulgent ego, inability to feel sympathy for anyone around her, frequent mood swings and childish behavior. These can be seen as the symptoms of some form of bipolar or personality disorder, but nothing is ever made of it beyond an offhand mention in the first season.
  • Luka Kovač has bouts of what appears to be clinical depression several times throughout his time on the show, but it's never officially diagnosed and the only time he appears to be seeking help, it turns out he's confiding in a prostitute. He also appears to suffer from PTSD as well.
• Fair for Its Day: Carter's patient in "ER Confidential", Rena Carlton, is a transgender woman. Carter is uncomfortable treating her, she corrects Benton when he refers to her as "Mr. Carlton", and Nurse Conni calls her a "she-male". It isn't until Rena is Driven to Suicide that Carter tries to be receptive towards her, but to no avail, leading Carter to have a Heroic BSoD for not being more attentive. At the time, this episode was considered groundbreaking because it was rare to see any depiction of a trans person, especially on a popular American TV show. However, Rena is played by a cisgender man, and the In-Universe negative reactions to The Reveal come off as very insensitive today, now that trans people have become more accepted and better understood. To the show's credit, it was impossible to find an openly trans actress to play Rena in 1994, Vondie Curtis-Hall portrayed Rena sympathetically and without being stereotypical, and, outside of the initial reactions from Benton and Conni, Rena is referred to with female pronouns.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: A rating's winner in the UK. An episode of Elizabeth's ending up being set there.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In "Sticks and Stones", Mark asks Carol if she still has insomnia and a headache, with neither knowing that she's actually pregnant. She responds, "Mark, you have to stop treating me like I have a brain tumor." Two seasons later, Mark is diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. While the tumor was successfully removed, it returns a year later and Mark dies from it at the end of Season 8.
  • Abby's one episode storyline regarding breast cancer is now this, given that Maura Tierney was later diagnosed with the very same disease.
  • J. Madison Wright, best known as True on Earth 2, played a little girl who died in "Hell and High Water". This was the first death of a child in the show's history. Wright died of a heart attack shortly before her twenty-second birthday.
  • In "Be Still My Heart", Luka informs two children that both of their parents died from a car accident. The son was played by Anton Yelchin in his acting debut. Yelchin was later killed in a car-related accident in 2016.
  • In the Pilot, Susan diagnoses a patient named Mr. Parker—played by Miguel Ferrer (George Clooney's cousin)—with end-stage lung cancer. Ferrer later died from throat cancer in 2017.
  • In-Universe. Pretty much every Carla scene from when she told Benton she was pregnant—bristling when he asked if she was certain he was the father—to afterwards—rebuffing all of Benton's sincere efforts to make amends and help her. Already looks bitchy, gets even worse when it turns out that Benton isn't Reese's biological father after all and she had to have known there was a chance of that.
  • A subplot in "Match Made in Heaven" has Abby treating a mother of five young kids who was clearly overwhelmed and starving herself so as to miscarry her current pregnancy. Two years later, similarly swamped and suffering from post-partum psychosis, Andrea Yates drowned her five children.
  • Two decades after playing the Alzheimer's-stricken Gabe Lawrence, Alan Alda was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, which he then kept secret for years just like Lawrence.
  • Any scene involving gunshot wounds or police, after Vanessa Marquez (Wendy Goldman) was shot by police after erratic behavior including pulling a BB gun on them, and died after being brought to a hospital.
  • The tension between Carter and Lucy gets this due to Noah Wyle admitting that he and Kellie Martin (Lucy's actress) didn't get along. The same could also be said for the Carter/Luka rivalry in Seasons 7-9, as Wyle admitted that he often felt jealous of Goran Višnjić.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: In Season 6, Carol gives birth to her and Doug's twin daughters. As of June 2017, George Clooney (Doug's portrayer) and his wife Amal are the parents of twins, albeit they're a boy and a girl.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the very first roles of George Clooney was in a short-lived sitcom called E/R, where he played the supporting role of "Ace", a snarky ER technician. A decade later, he gained world-wide fame thanks to playing Doug Ross. Oh, and both series are set in Chicago.
  • A patient named Patrick (played by Kevin Michael Richardson) with an undisclosed mental condition (probably some form of autism) answers the phone at the ER when the Desk Clerk is away. He says "ER? No, this is Patrick."
  • Harry Lennix and Carl Lumbly play love interests of Jeanie Boulet at separate points, both of whom ended up portraying the Martian Manhunter.
  • Betsy Brandt plays a woman hooked on crystal meth.
  • In-Universe. After Kerry Weaver came out of the closet, a lot of fans speculated that the antagonism between her and Susan when she first came on the show was in fact Belligerent Sexual Tension (even though she and Susan never got together) and that Kerry treated Susan as she did because she was confused and conflicted about her latent attraction to her.
  • Kathleen Wilhoite plays Susan's flighty, irresponsible older sister who has issues with drugs, terrible taste in men, and has a child but ends up abandoning it with her more responsible sibling. She would go on to play pretty much the exact same character in Gilmore Girls.
  • Amanda Lee's obsession with and stalking of Mark Greene in Season 5, now that portrayers have married.
  • Fans of Mariska Hargitay who have spent decades watching her play the self-sufficient, no-nonsense Det. Benson on Law & Order: SVU may be amused to watch her performance as weepy, clingy Fragile Flower Cynthia Hooper in Season 4.
• Hollywood Homely: In Season 6, Carter is meant to be seen as virtuous and noble for embracing his girlfriend's inner beauty after her mastectomy, but it is somewhat undermined by the fact that his girlfriend is played by Rebecca De Mornay.
• Ho Yay:
  • Many instances, but most notably Heterosexual Life-Partners Doug and Mark in the early seasons. Mark even says that he loves Doug...like a brother.
  • Female examples: Med student Mae Lee Park planted a kiss on Neela during Luka and Abby's wedding. She was surprised, to say the least.
• Hype Backlash: "Love's Labor Lost," one of the show's most acclaimed episodes which won several Emmys, has also built up a reputation for being highly overrated due to the extremely unrealistic and dangerous portrayal of treatment for eclampsia, with one doctor even joking he worried he'd get sued for malpractice just for watching it. Though these tend to ignore that the episode is part of a story arc about Dr. Greene becoming overconfident until this tragedy forces him back down to earth. They also forget that this was based on an actual incident that happened at a rural hospital, albeit with a different outcome and set of events.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: A cross between this and genre launcher might be Abby Lockhart. Once ER became the most popular show on television, it seemed like every new show from then on required at least one small, average-looking brunette with a rather caustic personality who is considered the ideal woman by most of the male cast.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Derek Fossen in "Rampage." As if the prior episode establishing him as an Abusive Parent wasn't enough, his reaction to his Woobie son being taken someplace safe is to invoke Going Postal on everybody even-remotely connected to his son's rescue (and soon just anyone in his way) — culminating in him targeting Greene's innocent family for Revenge by Proxy. Not for nothing Greene ends up responding via sneaky Vigilante Execution.
  • Steve Curtis goes from Abusive Parent to armed robber and in his final appearances, shoots up the ER, injuring several staff members and possibly killing others so as to kidnap Sam and their son Alex so that they can be together as a family again. He then shoots his two accomplices and rapes Sam under the delusion that they are now reconciled. No one grieved when Sam fatally shot him in what was technically murder—he was asleep on the ground, and therefore not an immediate threat to her or Alex.
• Narm: Dr. Romano's death, where an out of control helicopter falls on him just a year after another one cut off his arm. The writers seriously couldn't be a little more creative?
• Nausea Fuel: Many, many of the patients' injuries. Carter gets queasy in the Pilot after seeing a man with a severe knife-wound. Morris retches while treating a woman who immolated herself, guilt-ridden after injuring her baby in a car accident.
• Once Original, Now Common: When the show started airing, it was absolutely ground-breaking for a medical drama, and in the process, it was also completely divorcing itself from the soap opera genre, where all the other medical dramas made before ER firmly belonged. To say nothing about having a highly realistic portrayal (at least for its era) of medical procedures. Fast forward a few decades, and everything that made the show stand out became commonplace, making it hard to appreciate without the right context just how revolutionary it was back in the early 90s.
• One True Pairing: There is the expected amount of Ship-to-Ship Combat on this show, but nobody seems to think that Doug Ross and Carol Hathaway are meant for anyone but each other. The series agrees.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Morris started out as an annoying, bumbling, incompetent idiot who everyone hated. Bit by bit, he got his act together and improved and by the time the show ended, he was one of the best doctors in the hospital who everyone respected.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Abby is seemingly terrible at the scientific aspects of medicine, being unable to answer basic questions about biochemistry posed by Dubenko to her cohort of interns and failing her board exam. She all but says that "real doctors" act on instinct and empathy and don't waste time with biology and chemistry. At the same time, the show perspective takes it for granted that Abby is entitled to her dream relationship despite never permanently getting her alcoholism under control and cheating on her husband while he was away attending to his dying father. Abby and Luka quickly reconcile and are given a "happily ever after" sendoff in their final appearance on the show, without any real resolution to these years-long storylines about the former protagonist of the series before she departs and is never mentioned again.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Throughout the first few seasons of the show, many of its guest stars would go on to fame of their own—Lucy Liu, for example, spent several episodes playing the mother of an AIDS-stricken infant, Bradley Whitford played the grieving husband of a woman who died in childbirth, Kirsten Dunst played a runaway, Jessica Chastain played a young woman abused by her stepfather in one of her first acting roles, ect.
  • Olivia Benson spent a year as a desk clerk and Mark Greene's girlfriend before becoming a cop. This makes Anthony Edwards' (who played Mark) guest stint on SVU a nice callback.
  • Inverted with Nasim Pedrad. Despite Saturday Night Live being designated as the "Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time-Players", she spent two years on ER as a nurse before finding fame on SNL.
  • Chris Pine's first on-screen speaking role was a bit part as a teenage patient in the 2003 episode "A Thousand Cranes".
  • Elizabeth Corday has developed retroactive popularity after Alex Kingston became known for her work as River Song on Doctor Who.
  • Nick Offerman played the friend of a patient in the Live Episode "Ambush", almost a decade before his breakthrough role as Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation.
• The Scrappy: Carla Reese was a bitch from the time she got pregnant right up until she died, and even a little bit afterwards as well, with the confirmation that Reese isn't Peter's son. Apparently her actress, Lisa Nicole Carson, was a real-life one for the producers, who opted to fire her for her unpleasant behaviour.
  • Fans weren't too keen on Samantha Taggart, who joined in Season 10 as the new nurse, due to the writers trying too have her be "the cool single mom with the tough persona", only instead to come off as judgemental and argumentative. The same could be said for her son Alex.
• Seasonal Rot: Many parts of the fanbase, and those who watched it at the time, generally concede that the first half of the series is event television, a perception borne out by the series consistently maintaining a top 4 slot in the Nielsen ratings (the lowest rated was Season 6 at #4) and routinely smashing through ratings records buoyed by generally-strong storylines. What happens after that point, however, tends to divide fans:
  • Season 5 is considered by many to be the first genuinely weak one in the show's history. The entrance of Lucy Knight (via a Retool that delivered plenty of As You Know dialogue and Lucy being the Audience Surrogate) was handled very badly, as was the exit of Doug Ross via a shaky storyline that saw him leave Seattle despite Carol's protests. Numerous other storylines, such as a deranged woman being hired as the department's new chief, were downright embarrassing. The shakiness of early Season 6 is no doubt due to attempts at rectifying this. Despite this, Season 5 was #1 in the ratings (although its quality was probably partly the reason for Season 6's placement at #4).
  • Early Season 6 was a mess, with new characters being introduced (Kovac, Finch, Malucci, Chen and eventually Lockhart) or old characters leaving (Boulet, Knight and eventually Hathaway) the show every other episode. A fair amount of these new characters were fairly weak and/or uninteresting, with Kovac being the notable exception. However, the season was redeemed in the end by giving us the first death of a main cast member, Lucy, and a happy ending for Doug and Carol. Unfortunately, from then on, whenever the show tried to Win Back the Crowd, it would always fall to trying either one of these two things (either kill someone or give them a happy ending) with returns diminishing each time they tried it.
  • Because it was Carter's last season, Season 11 tried to be all about him and gave a storyline that deliberately went into Tear Jerker or heartwarming territory. It didn't go well, and while most people credit Season 13 as the season the show went back on track, Season 12 was already a big improvement over Season 11.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: Despite the show being off-air for more than a decade, fans still argue between Carter/Abby and Luka/Abby over which was the better couple. Luka/Sam often gets thrown into the mix too.
• Strangled by the Red String: The show really wanted a John Carter/Abby Lockhart romance, likely to replace the incredibly popular Carol/Doug romance. This resulted in Abby getting demoted back to being a nurse despite going to med school and not really caring all that much that her career was ruined, Luka Kovac becoming more of a jerk to justify breaking him up with Abby, and Carter taking an Entitled to Have You attitude in regards to Abby. This culminated in the pair getting together in season 9 after two seasons of buildup, but the romance only lasted a single season and both Carter and Abby moved on and married other characters.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • Kerry's insistence that staff abide by rules and policy. Unfortunately, this was undermined by her hypocrisy as well as the way she tried to bully people into submission.
  • Dave in "Loose Ends"- see "Unintentionally Sympathetic".
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Seasons 13-15 having the theme tune replaced with a shorter intro produced by series music composer Martin Davich was frowned upon with viewers who had been so accustomed to watching full-length opening credits and hearing James Newton Howard's initial/original theme music for 12 seasons.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Sara Gilbert's medical student Jane was a recurring character for several years, during which there were hints of her being an Always Someone Better for Neela, but ultimately she was never developed much beyond being the Hero of Another Story.
• Tough Act to Follow: In 1999, for the first time ever, the show aired a new episode on Thanksgiving night^note Holidays are typically designated for repeats or replaced with something else altogether, with Carol Hathaway giving birth to her and Doug's twins. The high ratings for the episode apparently inspired the creators to continue this tradition for subsequent Thanksgivings, only for none of the other episodes—with the exception of Season 10's "Freefall"—to be even remotely as exciting or interesting as the first.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • In Season 1, Dr. Taglieri is very clearly set-up to be the Dr. Jerk, getting into arguments with Doug Ross after the latter becomes incensed over the former's budding romance (and eventual engagement) with Carol, to the point of a physical altercation at their engagement. The problem is that the show does nothing to refute many of Tag's well-reasoned points, particularly a discussion in "ER Confidential" where he succinctly calls Carol out on having to "sit back and smile while (you) screw your old boyfriend!" More than once, he makes it clear that even though he and Doug might not like each other, Tag is the head of the paediatric unit, and a doctor running around below him making unilateral decisions (even when he's called in) is a foolish idea. Even after it becomes clear that Carol is having second thoughts about the wedding midway through the season, she refuses to change her mind until the eleventh hour, only coming to him at the wedding ceremony and being forced to admit that she doesn't love him, despite his Anguished Declaration of Love. And after all that, Carol confides to Doug that Tag was "boring", then tells everyone to "drink up" at the wedding reception because Tag's parents are footing the bill. No wonder why he disappeared completely after this.
  • The Designated Evil guy being proud of shooting the Big Bad in "Rampage", particularly as the latter was on his way to attack Mark's family at his house. Given the circumstances, many viewers felt he was justified in thinking that way, especially since the doctors were giving him borderline No Sympathy due to the Anvilicious gun-control message.
  • Dave Malucci in the episode "Loose Ends". While he obviously shouldn't have attacked a patient based on something he didn't know for sure, it's hardly surprising he'd be incensed on hearing that a man had raped his daughter.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Nurse Rhonda has a two-episode stint in Season 3 as a ward nurse who quits after Carol threatens to write her up over an error she made. She whines that she was deliberately assigned to the ER so that this would happen and she could be fired — apparently a money-saving scheme by the higher ups to make the hospital's oldest nurses do shifts in departments they have no experience in so they'll quit or be fired before their retirement benefits max out. Sucks... but this woman made major errors, one of which nearly killed a patient and another that left one crippled, and is completely unrepentant about it, instead invoking Never My Fault.
  • Carol is considered unsympathetic by some fans at least twice. In Season 1, she knows she's not in love with Tag and leads him on throughout the season. During the season finale, there's the callous way she leaves Tag no choice but to leave her at the altar. She then spends a moment mocking him with Doug. In Season 6, she whines about how difficult it is to raise twin girls on her own, but she's the one who wouldn't let Doug come back when he wanted to. She also inadvertently leads Luka on throughout the season, abandoning and devastating him after how supportive of her and her daughters he was, when he had just started to heal from his traumatic past, starting to move on with her help.
  • In Season 8, Dave Malucci pleads with Kerry not to fire him because "I have a kid to support." Well, gee, Dave, maybe you should have tried not being an irresponsible jackass by having sex with a paramedic when you were supposed to be working? And that's not even counting the errors he made before that—Elizabeth outright tells him, "None of us thinks you're much of a doctor", and rather than buckling down and working to improve himself, he keeps goofing off as usual. Even among those who don't like Kerry, Malucci's literal last word to her being a homophobic slur tends to obliterate audience sympathy for him.
• The Un-Twist: Kerry and the police question a traumatized little girl who was present when her drug-dealing father was shot. The child blithely admits that she shot her father. When Kerry gently asks if he was abusing her, the girl says it was because he wouldn't let her watch TV. It seems like the revelation that she's an Enfant Terrible, until she elaborates that he threatened to shoot her if she turned on the TV while he was napping, "so I shot him first", meaning that Kerry's first instinct was correct.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The moral that Frank's casual racism should be excused because of his family issues and The Generation Gap would never fly today.
  • Characters use the terms "retard" and "mental retardation" fairly liberally to describe patients with an intellectual disability, although both Romano and Nurse Manager Eve use the former as a synonym for "dumb" or "stupid" in the respective episodes "It's All in Your Head" and "Dream House". At the time, both terms were considered fair game to use. Nowadays, however, both terms and all other variations are considered much more offensive, discriminatory, and completely unacceptable to use in any conversation.
  • Abby's drunken one night stand with Moretti. The show treats it as an extra-martial affair, but considering that Abby was blackout drunk and Moretti was not (he was sober enough to drive her back to his apartment), it would be more akin to date rape nowadays.
• The episode "Next of Kin" has Carter and several other characters referring to a young trans girl as "he" and her mum cutting her hair, and also insisting on her being male. This behaviour would definitely not be portrayed as okay in the 2020s!
• The Woobie: Has its own page now.

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