Join Scott & Tom as they break down this week’s pilot: Emergency!
Emergency! is an American television series that combines the medical drama and action-adventure genres. It was produced by Mark VII Limited (Jack Webb’s company) and distributed by Universal Studios. It debuted as a midseason replacement on January 15, 1972, on NBC, replacing the short-lived series The Good Life, and ran until September 3, 1977, with several more made-for-TV movies during the 1978–1979 season. Emergency! was created and produced by Jack Webb and Robert Cinader, both of whom were also responsible for the police dramas Adam-12 and Dragnet.
UPDATE: You can watch this pilot here!
PLAY
– MP3 download
– The RSS Feed
– The iTunes Subscription
– The Frogpants Ultra Feed (iTunes)
I spent seven years as a volunteer firefighter/EMS responder and this show was an inspiration.
Despite what this show says, there are some things that cannot be fixed with ringer’s lactate with D5W LOLz
Man, I had that board game. The game had little fire engines you drove around the city. If I remember right, you drew a card which gave you your destination and you had to roll the dice to get there as soon as you could. Loved that game, and wore it out.
btw, I didn’t know the show was so old. I must have watched it in reruns in the early 80s.
Never heard of this show. Not sure if we got it in the UK and if we did, it was before my time. Or it just wasn’t interesting enough for me
I shall listen to the podcast anyway, you know, because of the awesome.
I suspect that the name had to be changed for syndication because there were only three major stations, and there weren’t the outlets for showing syndicated shows like there are now, so the syndicated version would end up being shown in the afternoon on the same day and channel that the night-time version would run. Imagine people looking in TV Guide and seeing that Emergency was going to run at 4pm, before they got home…how mad would they have been? So they changed the name so you’d know it wasn’t the first-run version. Yes, they should just have assumed we were smart enough to know that the first-run version wouldn’t run at 4pm, but they always assumed we were stupider than we are.
i think there were still some shows into the 90′s and early 00′s that “glorified” the positions and provided a good balance between the “people with problems” personal crap and the actual “on the job” stuff. Third Watch comes to mind as being actually kinda exciting and focusing on the cops/paramedics/firefighter jobs. there was also another show in the 90′s called High Incident which focused on cops in a fictional suburb of LA. both weren’t high art, but i think that “action/adventure” style mixed with the human drama/procedural stuff.
I think the show Scott was thinking about was Third Watch. That had cops, paramedics and firefighters and aired for 6 seasons from 1999 to 2005 on NBC. It was a ‘sister show’ to ER and even had a crossover episode with that show at one point. This was despite the fact that ER was set in Chicago an Third Watch was set in New York.
Speaking of crossovers, Eureka, Warehouse 13 and Alphas all exist in the same universe and have had a few (non-ironic) crossover episodes with each other.
In the podcast they are trying to come up with current shows that have guest actor appearance. House MD would be that show. The patient of the week in House in House is often that type a guest appearance.
I used to watch this all the time as a kid. I didn’t know then, but Julie London was at one time married to Jack Webb.
I’m trying to remember the names of other shows with different titles for syndication. Happy Days Again, Laverne and Shirley and Company, CHiPs Patrol…I know there were more. It never made sense to me as a kid, but that was probably because I would memorize TV schedules. I was a strange kid. Surprising, I know.
Just watching the show now on gozie.com. So far it’s a great example of equipment porn. You can tell it was directed by Jack Web, there is basically no dialog, and what there is is direct and to the point. Nobody ever accused Jack Web (or Joe Friday) of being a chatterbox…
At first I was amazed at how antiquated the equipment looks, but since it the pilot was filmed in 1972, the fact that the rescue truck is built on a ’65 Chevy truck chassis is not that hard to believe.
Warning! If you’re watching on gozie.com, DO NOT try to back up if you missed some dialog. I was about 35 minutes into the show, and now I’m having to play it all the way through from the beginning to get back to where I was.
Anybody notice that when Dr. Brackett asks Nurse McCall for a reading on the defibrillator, she says “400 Watt seconds”, then they show a close -up of a meter that only goes up to 200 Watt seconds?
That’s what you get when you have to watch the first half of the show twice…
thank you for the link. I was disappointed that Netflix had it only on DVD. great show watched this and the cartoon in the late 70′s and early 80′s. had no idea that it was about the beginning of paramedics. I always thought that they were always around. I wish they had more shows like this. the ending when they are trying to free the trapped worker had me on the edge of my seat. pretty good for a show 40 years old. do you have a link for the cartoons??