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Bedside Manners: George Clooney and ER

by Sam Keenleyside

Last January, the executives at NBC took a deep breath and bought themselves the most popular show on television for the astonishing sum of $13-million an episode. But when they locked up the hospital drama ER for three more years they didn’t get its star. George Clooney, who plays the abrasive emergency-room pediatrician Doug Ross, has announced that he’s leaving the series when his contract runs out at the end of next season (1998-99). While the dark, brooding Clooney has emerged as the male pin-up of the series, NBC is betting that the show will do quite nicely without him.

There’s little in this very slight and adoring book to make you think otherwise: Sam Keenleyside has produced this breathless bio for devotees who don’t need convincing that Clooney is special. The man who parades through Bedside Manners is not an actor of any obvious talent beyond the slightly dissipated looks and a willingness to work very hard. Clooney’s brief, uninteresting life is summarized in a mere 101 large-print pages culled from the most uncritical secondhand sources, and the rest of the book is taken up with fan-club filler ranging from breezy ER plot summaries to the elaborate rules of an ER-watcher’s drinking game, and an itemization of the characters Dr. Doug Ross has slept with.

Does the star make the series or the series make the star? That is the essential question that goes unexamined in this book. From the TV producer’s viewpoint, Clooney plays a useful role in an acting ensemble that wouldn’t have worked as well if it had been dominated by big-name stars. But in this kind of intricate, fast-paced TV drama, the strength of a show such as ER lies more in the writing and direction. The actors are there for their looks, their personal style – Clooney is a convincing kind of trauma-centre thug– and their willingness to put in brutal 15-hour days, and still be fresh in the morning.

And that’s where Clooney excels. As Keenleyside shows, his entire career before ER was based on an unstoppable determination that kept him going through countless aborted TV series when other actors would have been driven into extended rehab.

So why is Clooney walking away? That question, like so many others, is left unanswered in this uninquisitive book.

 

Reviewer: John Allemang

Publisher: ECW

DETAILS

Price: $16.95

Page Count: 200 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-55022-336-4

Released: Apr.

Issue Date: 1998-6

Categories: Politics & Current Affairs