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When Stories End
Every story comes to an end. Or does it?
Over the last few weeks, I watched the entirety of one of my favorite childhood shows, ER, beginning to end.
If you’ve somehow managed to avoid the fifteen-season phenomenon, ER tells the story of the doctors, nurses, and other staff in the emergency room at Chicago’s County General Hospital. The staff come and go — sometimes finding greener pastures, and sometimes just plain dying horribly — but County stays the same.
It’s only slightly less melodramatic than its spiritual successor, Grey’s Anatomy. It’s common for people to shit on Grey’s for being a soap opera, but rewatching ER reminded me that it wasn’t much better — County General sees it share of drama, from shootouts and stabbings to some serious issues with their helipad (poor Rocket Romano!) to a desk clerk taking out most of the admit area with a rocket launcher.
Anyway, I digress. ER is a great show, and it’s on Hulu if you haven’t caught it yet. Expect some serious ’90s flashbacks in the earlier seasons— the pagers, the hairstyles, Kathy Griffin’s original nose — but eventually, they catch up to the (almost) modern world; the show ended its run in ‘09.
Watching the end of ER got me thinking about the end of stories. There are two camps to how people imagine stories.
