ER TLC: Abby Lockhart (Maura Tierney) and Dr Kerry Weaver (Laura Innes) treat a baby. Photograph: Channel 4
Last week I posted about how much I love hospital dramas. But the past couple of days have made me rethink that, or at least, think about how vital the strong-doctor character at the heart of hospital soaps is.
The current episode of ER - being shown lots of times this week on Channel 4 and E4 and E4+1 - sees Kerry Weaver bow out of the series after a decade at County General. Played by Laura Innes, Kerry's character has seen some pretty dramatic happenings: coming out as a lesbian; losing her lover and then having to fight her lover's parents for custody of Sandy's little boy; and generally being loathed and loved in equal measures by other characters.
Ever since the demise of Greene, Kerry has been the heart of ER, and the rather shabby and hurried storyline that led to her departure has ripped the heart out of the series. She's been offered a job on a Miami TV station as a telly doctor - which happily came just as Luka, now her boss, fired her to make a budget cut.
Kerry deserved a much better send-off. And ER can do great send-offs. The death of Mark Greene from a brain tumour was powerful stuff, a three-hanky farewell. And who can forget the death of Robert Romano under a crashing helicopter? Magnificent.
Meantime, Holby City has a new A&E consultant in Casualty. I'm already rolling my eyes at Stitch (terrible nickname, by the way, scriptwriters, can't you do better?). He's played by Aussie soapie Peter O'Brien, who was one of the founding characters in Neighbours and then went on to his first medical soap, Flying Doctors. Stitch is unconventional, abrasive, doesn't do rules and has upset pretty much everyone in the normally staid A&E department.
It's painfully obvious that this is a cheap trick to reinvigorate Casualty which has been clunking along for a while now with leaden storylines and wooden acting.
Medical soaps need a strong senior doctor at their heart. ER needs to find a replacement for Kerry otherwise it will turn into a rudderless ship crewed by eye-candy - and Casualty needs to stop trying to revive itself with Stitch.
