ER

Long before Jurassic Park was the embryo of an idea in Michael Crichton's mind, there was ER. A medical student who dreamt of a career in Hollywood, Crichton did what any aspiring writer would: he mined his own life to create a script based on his time working in a high-octane hospital emergency department. Of course, nobody wanted it. It wasn't until Crichton turned his attention to dinosaurs and his 1990 novel Jurassic Park became a mega-hit—and a mega-movie franchise—that Steven Spielberg asked the former doctor what other ideas he was kicking around. Producers weren't interested in Crichton's feature film idea. But, they were looking for new television series programming and thought there might be something even bigger in the concept than a movie. And, thus, ER was born.

Despite some resistance from NBC's top brass, the Warner Bros. Television drama became an overnight hit with its high-adrenaline storylines, realistic dialogue, and bona fide (not to mention hot) stars in the making in the cast, including Julianna Margulies, Noah Wyle, Anthony Edwards, and an actor who didn't end up amounting to much named George Clooney. ER premiered opposite the popular CBS drama Chicago Hope and quickly cannibalized its competition. It would, in its heyday, net 35 million viewers per episode (in an era before streaming and DVRs), and was either the number one or number two most watched show on television for six years.

Over the course of its fifteen years on air, ER would feature weddings, births, break-ups, death, and medical conundrums in just about every form you could imagine. Although stars like Clooney and Margulies would come and go, ER introduced (or, in some cases, re-introduced) the world to actors like Mekhi Phifer, Linda Cardellini, Ming-Na Wen, Angela Bassett, and even a pre-Housewives Kyle Richards as a nurse. It won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama and was nominated a staggering 124 times. As popular as Grey's Anatomy is now, there would be no Meredith Grey without ER.

A New York Times bestselling author of How to Save a Life: The Inside Story of Grey's Anatomy, Lynette Rice covered ER during her days at Entertainment Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter and forged close connections with the show's cast, crew and studio/network executives.