TeeVee Awards '02: Worst Hour Show

The bigger they are, the harder they fall -- which would explain the cartoon-style, ER-shaped hole that our Worst Hour Show award winner has left through the crust of the Earth. NBC's flagship drama series has gotten so bad that those of us who watched it rumble past us a couple of years ago -- picking up speed and headed toward Earth's molten core -- can only laugh the hearty, bitter laughter of people who know you can't have nice things.

Once among the best series on TV, ER is now so stomach-cramplingly, bowel-rattlingly awful that the only reason to watch this past season was to root for the tumor baking inside Mark Greene's head. Any show that can get you to wish for the painful, prolonged death of a major protagonist must have burned some serious bridges along the way, and ER has been merrily lighting matches for years.

At one point, ER was a brilliant triumph of style and substance. But now it can stand only as a tutorial on how to take something original and daring and frantic and effectively emotionally manipulative and turn it into a campy, tiring, Grade-C soap.

"Melo" was always the junior partner to ER's "drama," but in the past several seasons the prefix has taken over the show, like a vestigial head that has since grown to full size and eaten the original. Once-human characters have been reduced to moody, annoying caricatures and once-interesting situations have devolved into a series of painful, predictable bleats. We can only be thankful that Elvis is dead, because God knows what projectile he would have unleashed at his TV set if he ever had a chance to watch ER.