ER (TV series)
Following the broadcast of its two-hour pilot movie on September 19, 1994, "ER" premiered Thursday, September 22 at 10:00. It remained in the same Thursday time slot for its entire run. "ER" is NBC's third longest-running drama, after "Law & Order" and "", and, the longest-running American primetime medical drama of all time. On April 2, 2008, NBC announced that the series would return for its fifteenth season. The fifteenth season was originally scheduled to run for 19 episodes before retiring with a two-hour series finale to be broadcast on March 12, 2009, but NBC announced in January 2009 that it would extend the show by an additional three episodes to a full 22-episode order as part of a deal to launch a new series by John Wells titled "Police", later retitled "Southland". "ER"s final episode aired on April 2, 2009; the two-hour episode was preceded by a one-hour retrospective special. The series finale charged $425,000 per 30-second ad spot, more than three times the season's rate of $135,000. From season 4 to season 6 ER cost a record-breaking 13 million dollars per episode. TNT also paid a record price of $1 million an episode for four years of repeats of the series during that time. The cost of the first three seasons was 2 million per episode and seasons 7 to 9 cost 8 million dollars per episode.
History of the National Health Service
Within a few years of the NHS, popular fictional films were beginning to focus on the NHS as a location for dramatic narratives. Films such as "White Corridors" (Pat Jackson, 1951) and "Mandy" (Alexander MacKendrick,1952), shown within the early years of the NHS, showed day-to-day life in an NHS hospital as well as dealing with specific single-issue topics such as deafness within postwar British society. The Doctor series, starring firstly Dirk Bogarde and later Leslie Philips, took a comedic look at the antics of a young doctor in an NHS hospital and the Carry on ... comedies, Carry on Nurse (Gerald Thomas,1959), Carry on Doctor (Gerald Thomas, 1967) and Carry on Matron (Gerald Thomas, 1972) also used comic situations within the NHS hospital to poke fun at both the NHS as an institution and the capers of doctors, nurses and patients alike. From the late 1950s, the NHS also became an important subject within the wider history of British soap operas. Emergency Ward 10 was first broadcast in 1957 on ITV and ran until 1967 and followed the life and loves of the staff and patients of the fictionalised Oxbridge General. ITV later followed this up with General Hospital which borrowed much from Emergency Ward 10 in terms of its themes and focus. The idea of a medical hospital as a suitable and popular setting for a soap opera continued to take root in the 1980s. Casualty, set in an A&E department, was first broadcast in 1986 and has since become the longest running medical drama in the world. At a time when controversy over the NHS was high on the public agenda, Paul Unwin and Jeremy Brock began their proposal for Casualty by declaring that ‘In 1948 a dream was born: a National Health Service. In 1985 the dream is in tatters.’ This politicised agenda remained in evidence during the first three series of the Casualty, with the programme showing how those who fictionally worked for the NHS were also dissatisfied with the new direction of the Service. During the 1990s television began more overtly showing medical practitioners who were critical or cynical of the NHS. In particular, Cardiac Arrest was broadcast on BBC 1 utilised this type of cynicism within its narrative plots. Television has also forged a place for the NHS within reality television programming. In particular 24 Hours in A&E and One Born Every Minute have adopted medical documentary formats to show the inner workings of particular NHS hospital departments. Fly-on-the-wall footage is interweaved with interviews with patients, staff and relatives as they give their perspectives on the medical cases shown in each episode.