'ER': An Oral History

Moonves: On the day of the pilot screening I [ran into Openden], and I expected her to fall in my arms saying it was the greatest pilot they ever screened. But she said it really didn't go that well. We started working the phones. The idea was to say, ''Guys, this was our highest-testing pilot we've ever seen.'' So we did a third test together.

Beckman: We put the pilot on cable systems and recruited people to view it. If you weren't recruited and you happened to be flipping around, you could see it that way, too. We started getting calls from ravenous people, asking, ''What was that?''

Reilly: One thing that came out of the research was how sorry everybody was to see Julianna go. So we just looped a line in saying, ''It looks like she's going to make it out of the coma!''

Littlefield: There was lots of doubting, but we had a feeling there was something here. How does a network say ''I love you''? You say yes and pick up the show!

Wells: To Don's credit, as soon as the testing showed something else, he gave us the best time slot in television. He literally said to me at one point, ''What the hell do I know?''

Beckman: CBS announced Chicago Hope as their Thursday-at-10 o'clock show before we announced ER.

Reilly: The conventional wisdom was that ER was interesting, but Chicago Hope was the more commercial show.

Moonves: CBS played dirty with the advertising campaign over the summer. They said, ''We've got David Kelley and NBC has a bunch of people who haven't done that much television.''

Jeff Sagansky, CBS Entertainment president, 1990-94: We had another David Kelley show called Picket Fences, which had won the Emmy for best drama two years in a row. Plus, we had an incredible cast. ER had an incredible cast too, but nobody knew it then.

Beckman: We premiered ER on a Monday night [Sept. 19, 1994, and got 23.8 million viewers]. Then we ran the next episode that Thursday, and it exploded. We beat Chicago Hope [and the 18-49 numbers shot up by 2 million].

Littlefield: It didn't take that long for CBS to move Hope.

Sagansky: Chicago Hope was a successful show, but it was in the shadow of a super show. So it never got its due.

Beckman: I had a feeling CBS would move Hope to Monday night at 10 the day after New Year's. So we announced we'd repeat the ER pilot on that day. In early December, Don got a call from Hope star Mandy Patinkin, who wanted to know what NBC had against his show.

Ohlmeyer: I always had a great deal of respect for Mandy for doing that. But my job was to kick the s--- out of CBS.