‘Er,’ ‘Cybill’ Related In Dysfunctional Way
Here is a tale of two series I should have written about earlier this year but didn’t. So sue me.
These are the best of times for “ER,” high atop the Nielsen ratings this season while anchoring an impregnable Thursday night lineup on NBC. They are worse times for “Cybill,” the brazenly witty CBS comedy doing just so-so after relocation to the coveted Sunday time slot after “60 Minutes” that was formerly occupied by “Murder, She Wrote.”
“ER” and “Cybill” are not as unrelated as you might think. The hospital characters of “ER” dispense treatment, the characters of “Cybill” need treatment.
I joined most critics in warmly embracing “ER” when it premiered last season. And to boot, I even watched it some afterward.
This season, I didn’t watch it at all because of my devotion to “Murder One,” the gleaming, brainy crime drama from Steven Bochco that ABC threw against “ER” and the CBS News series “48 Hours.”
“Murder One” was designed to follow a single murder case through an entire season, making it a risk for ABC. Miss one episode, you were confused. Miss two episodes, you definitely weren’t in Kansas anymore. Tape it, and you had to make time for it later.
Immediately hooked on “Murder One” and its dark, unheroic characters, I bid goodbye to “ER” and its heroes. As it turned out, most of America never said hello to “Murder One,” whose lowly ratings forced ABC to yank it last month in advance of redeployment at 10 p.m. Mondays in January, after the conclusion of “Monday Night Football.” Just how many new viewers will be drawn to “Murder One” next month after missing a slew of prerequisite episodes will be another tale for another time.
It’s much easier catching up on “ER.”
The “ER” caseload per hour is crushing. So quiet pauses for introspection, along with various personal traumas and romantic interludes, are ever the more dramatic in juxtaposition with emergency-room healers and their patients hurtling down hospital corridors thick with humanity, raw feelings and punchy dialogue (“Stabbing coming in!”) to the heavy beat of pulsating music - sequences so wired that you want to suggest that next time they try the decaf.
No subtleties here, no nuances or shadings. Everything on the surface. Yet it was television at its mightiest and most thrilling, and reason enough to rejoin the “ER” bandwagon.
Much roomier these days is the bandwagon for “Murder, She Wrote,” the venerable mystery whose once lofty ratings dove dramatically this season in its new time slot opposite a couple of those hit NBC series (“Friends,” “The Single Guy”) that precede “ER.”
No wonder, then, that Angela Lansbury and her mature groupies didn’t like it much when CBS exiled “Murder, She Wrote” across the planet to Thursdays at 8 p.m., far, far from the beneficial afterglow of dominant “60 Minutes.”
Moving her show worked out fine for me, however. It made me a devoted fan of “Cybill,” now occupying Lansbury’s former 8 p.m. Sunday time slot.
After reviewing “Cybill” last season, I rarely watched it on Mondays. Because I never miss “60 Minutes” at 7 p.m. Sunday, though, I now never miss “Cybill,” affirming that in my case, at least, the power of the lead-ins is no myth. As they sometimes say on “ER,” I’m definitely getting a pulse.