It is easy now to forget just what a cultural force US hospital drama ER was. This was a show powerful enough to get George Clooney named Sexiest Man Alive, a position he has since parlayed into a lucrative career as a coffee-pod salesman. Over 15 seasons, pretty much every American “Oh, I recognise them!” actor of the 1990s and early 2000s first got to show their acting chops and internal organs in ER’s beds; Lucy Liu, Christina Hendricks, Aaron Paul and Zac Efron were all wheeled into the eponymous emergency room at some point. Truly, ER was to US actors what Casualty and The Bill are across the pond.

ER revelled in all the ways our fragile human bodies can be mashed, mangled and mutilated, but a medical drama that did not delve into the personal lives of the doctors would be oddly bloodless. ER, at least at first, made viewers care as much about what happened to its characters outside the hospital as within its gore-spattered walls. The medics got divorced, mugged, dumped and depressed, but always pulled through for the sake of the patients. One of the second season’s standout episodes found Clooney pondering the pointlessness of it all in his car when a boy knocks on the window. In a Lassie-esque turn of events a child had become trapped in a sewer with the waters rising. Clooney saved both the boy and his belief in life. For 10 seasons ER managed to skilfully stitch together the often bitter realities of medicine with such gloriously life-affirming storylines.

Chopper cropper... Doctor Romano, prior to his helicopter woes. Photograph: Channel 4

Taking the action outside the hospital in the early series allowed ER and its characters to take big risks. One episode saw doctors leaping over sparking power lines to rescue a woman in labour trapped in an ambulance. As the writers desperately tried to resuscitate the show after it started to flatline, however, we were dragged from the hospital for the flimsiest of reasons. When a nurse’s boring son, or a nurse’s mother with bipolar, or a doctor’s scallywag of a sister goes missing we forsake all medicine to go and have a tedious wander around in search of them. Episodes where seemingly the entire staff runs away to a war-torn Africa would today be used as textbook examples of “white saviour” stories.

By season 10, the golden age of Clooney was long over and main characters were transferring, or exiting via the morgue. One moment in particular from that season was so bad, “Jump the Shark” should be renamed “Drop the Helicopter”. After cocky surgeon Robert “Rocket” Romano had his arm chopped off by a helicopter’s tail blade you would think nothing worse could happen to him. Where once he was a love-to-hate-him character, he became a pitiable mess, one-armed surgeons not being in great demand. Pity makes for poor television. To salvage the situation, the writers decided that two wrongs could make a right after all, and had another helicopter fall out of the sky, crushing him in an unintentionally comedic homage to the Wicked Witch of the West. At least he got a quick exit. The show continued on life support for five more seasons until, mercifully, the plug was pulled.