More Bad Television: Emergency!

Thanks to Netflix, I have been finding myself watching Emergency!  It's oddly addictive, even though the pilot feels very dated.  Part of it, as I think I said on twitter, is that it's so weird to see people arguing about whether or not paramedics should exist.  At this point, with forty-three years hindsight, it's like watching people argue about whether or not television or cars will catch on.

Some of it is just that everyone has terrible seventies hair.  Terrible.  What were you guys thinking back then?

I have come to a couple of conclusions/observations based on watching maybe four or five episodes, from scattered points in the series:

1.  The lead doctor is kind of a douchebag, but he has gravelly seventies voice.  Which is, to be fair, kind of hot.

2.  If the lead nurse is 30, as the pilot claims, then I'm twelve.  That said, she's pretty entertaining.  And she seems to do everything in that damn hospital.

Including the lead doctor.  (Sorry, that was in poor taste.)

It is another sign of the times though, that a fair bit of attention is paid in the pilot about her being unmarried at her age.  Ultimately, even if she is closer to 45 than 30, she's still no older than most of the doctors in Grey's Anatomy or ER. Though to be fair, this only really came up in the pilot.  It was not mentioned in the other episodes that I watched.

Also, her mascara and false eyelashes kind of scare me.

3.  The silver haired doctor is awesome.

4.  The paramedic boys are clearly the eye candy.  There's a red haired dude and a dark haired dude.  The red haired dude has unfortunate side burns and a bit of an overbite, so I've decided the dark haired dude is the hot one.  If only by default, because he kind of starts getting Farrah Fawcett hair in later episodes.  And that's just unfortunate.

5.  The dark haired dude seems to get injured in like every episode that I saw.  Seriously.  I was picking at RANDOM.  He ought to have like a designated hospital room.

6.  I saw two episodes in a row, that were actually sequential episodes, in which some dude lay unconscious on some scaffolding.  It wasn't the same guy, as the guy in the first episode actually died.  The people of these towns need to stay the fuck off of scaffolding.

7.  Apparently symptoms of the deadly new flu that hits the medical personnel include terrible eye-shadow (douchey lead doctor).  The hot-by-default paramedic got off lucky, as they just seemed to slather him with vaseline to make his cheekbones all shiny.

They were very shiny.

8.  Does the firefighter with the mustache (Chet?) have ANY redeeming qualities?  Because he pretty much didn't in any of the five episodes that I watched.  It probably didn't help that he spent all of one episode making racist Native-American jokes to his co-worker.

9.  The episode where a little girl is injured by a drunk driver is really fucking depressing.  Not because of what happened to the girl (she got better), but because this SAME episode could be written for any of the current hospital shows.  42 years later, and NOTHING has changed.

10.  It was really difficult to get used to the very seventies music at first.  I kept expecting it to turn into a parody, someone to break character, or something.

11.  The theme song is catchy though.

12.  You know, even granted that this show was filmed in and takes place in the 70s, I still would be a lot less worried going to this hospital than to any of the ones that are currently on television.  At least the doctor and nurse only seem to be sleeping together at HOME.  And they don't generally seem to kill anyone with incompetence.

Except maybe that first guy who had cardiac arrest on the scaffolding.  Who knows what might have happened, had his rescuer not passed out from the plague just as he got to him.  But then, that was that guy's own fault because he didn't stay off the fucking scaffolding.

13.  Seriously, stay off the fucking scaffolding