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Code BlueSlate readers bid a fond, sad farewell to ER.

Posted Wednesday, April 1, 2009, at 6:33 PM ET

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One way to describe this reason for watching is simply to call it inertia: You watch ER every Thursday night because you watch ER every Thursday night. "Holy crap," writes Jessica Rovanpera of El Sobrante, Calif. "I've been watching this show more than half my life. This is increasingly distressing. I guess it's just a force of habit." A more romantic way of describing it would be to say that ER became part of viewers' lives. "I mark milestones in my marriage by ER," writes Michelle Van Der Karr of Evanston, Ill. "It started when my oldest child was a baby. My youngest was born the day George Clooney left. After the doctor was finally finished with my delivery, I looked up in time to see the end credits rolling (don't despair; I caught that episode in reruns that summer)."

Several younger Slate readers said their affection for the show stems from having grown up watching it. "I began watching ER as a kid interested in science and thinking of becoming a doctor," writes Eleanor Vernon of Houston. "I continued following it as a college student who was still interested in science but knew her sister, not she, would go into medicine. I still tune in as an attorney whose sister is an ER pediatrician, like Doug Ross. When I speak of her, that's how I describe her: 'This is my sister. She has the coolest job of anyone I know. She's an ER pediatrician, like George Clooney on ER.' "

Eleanor is onto something. Despite all the turnover in the cast, there has been one constant on ER: the ER. Nearly all the Slate readers who wrote in noted the electric energy of the emergency room, the natural drama of the stories that unfold there, and the heroic, but also just human, acts that occur there every day. The show brought viewers inside that world, titillating them with (for the time) groundbreaking gore but also offering them catharsis and the occasional gut-check. Many Slate readers noted that the show was expert at reminding the viewer who is in fine fettle just how lucky she is and how quickly a drunk driver or infectious disease could change her fortunes.

The most poignant account of how the show managed to capture the life-or-death stakes of the ER came from Kathryn Morse, of Weybridge, Vt., who gets the final word:

I still watch E.R. because it reminds me, week after week, in a visceral way, that every day, somewhere, other human beings face the sudden, unexpected, tragic loss of a beloved person—often in a chaotic Emergency Room. E.R. often (still) leaves me speechless and grateful that today, at least, it was not me in an E.R. somewhere, unbelieving and bereft. In August 1993 my 21-year old sister committed suicide in a Boston hospital. She overdosed on antidepressants, coded, and the doctors could not revive her. My parents, alone in a hospital corridor, had to make the decision to end life support. Thirteen months later I first watched E.R.—the pilot episode in which Carol Hathaway attempted suicide. I've done a fair amount of grieving in front of the T.V. since then. When the show doesn't trigger and release my own grief, it elicits compassion for others beginning the long journey through loss.