9/26/97

NBC's live action heroes make history on ER

By DAVID BIANCULLI
Daily News TV Critic

Last night's season premiere of NBC's "ER," the first weekly drama series to broadcasst

episode live, was flawless, thrilling, fascinating and a total success.

Three hours later, for the West Coast, the entire cast and crew had to gear up to try to repeat their triumph — but no matter what happened during that second telecast, the "ER" folks already had pitched one perfect game.

Carol Flint, the "ER" co-executive producer who wrote last night's script, didn't exactly hold back and play it safe. Not only did she give several cast members strong emotional scenes that were the equivalent of very tense soliloquies, but she included a lot of tricky special effects, introduced two new regular cast members and even made room for an incredibly high-risk factor: a scene in which George Clooney's Doug Ross examines a crying baby.

All this action was relayed using hand-held video cameras, ostensibly there as tools of documentary film makers to observe the doctors and nurses in action, as in real-life documentarian Frederick Wiseman's "Hospital." But Wiseman was one man with one camera; for "ER," director Thomas Schlamme employed 11 cameras in all, including two whose operators actually became part of the story, interviewing the people in front of the camera.

Alex Kingston and Maria Bello, the brand-new "ER" cast members (Kingston playing a surgical resident from England, Bello a new staff doctor), survived their baptism of fire without incident. No lines were blown, except for one flub by Gloria Reuben's Jeanie — and that, as it turned out, actually was a cleverly scripted mistake, showing her character's nervousness in front of the documentary cameras.

Really, though, nervousness was nowhere to be found. Some of the hand-held camera moves were quite daunting and ambitious, yet nothing went wrong. Technical effects, except for some slightly mechanical projectile vomiting, were wonderful, and the acting, from the silent extras to the major leads, was fully up to the high-wire occasion.

Laura Innes, whose Dr. Kerry Weaver lashed out in anger at one of the film makers, delivered the most intense performance of all in the East Coast "ER" broadcast, followed closely by Anthony Edwards as Mark Greene — who had perhaps the toughest job, closing out the program with a quiet, lengthy monologue similar to that classic interview episode of "M*A*S*H."

Everyone did well, though, and they even were loose enough to have a little fun. Julianna Margulies' Carol Hathaway, entering the lounge and, seeing a baseball game on the TV, asked Clooney's Ross the score — allowing him to deliver a real-time accurate rundown of "8-1, Cubs behind, bottom of the seventh."

Elsewhere, just for the fun of it, Clooney wrenched his head from side to side and loudly cracked his neck. And why not? It was live TV, and great TV — and it was fun TV, too.