Trauma: Life in the E.R.
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Trauma: Life in the E.R. is a medical-based television reality show that formerly ran on TLC from 1997 to 2002 and now runs stripped weeknights on Discovery Health Channel. At its peak, Trauma was one of TLC's top-rated shows and spawned two spin-offs, Paramedics (which also runs stripped on DHC and precedes Trauma nightly) and Code Blue. Current real-life medical shows such as The Critical Hour and Babies: Special Delivery owe both their general format and their very existence to the success of one of reality television's first genuine hits.
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[edit] Show history
The show debuted in 1997. Like much of the medical-based programming on TLC (and DHC as well), the show was designed as a "real-life" version of a popular U.S. TV series. In this case, Trauma was designed to capitalize on the success of the NBC drama ER. The show follows the cases coming through Level one trauma centers and high-profile emergency rooms around the U.S. The first season consisted of several half-hour episodes, but by 1998, the series had expanded to a full hour, allowing for more time to follow cases as well as the real-life lives of the doctors involved.
The show had no regular cast; every week featured a different hospital and a different group of doctors. Actor Michael McGlone narrated the series.
Most episodes centered around the physicians and nurses comprising the staff of a typical Level One trauma center, but occasionally a different type of staffer would be profiled to show their unique contributions to that specific hospital. For example, at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana, the hospital's chaplain (a nun with the Sisters of Charity) was profiled in one episode, and another episode at Charity Hospital profiled the New Orleans paramedics, which was used as the pilot for the show Paramedics. Another episode followed a burn patient through his recovery at Vanderbilt University's medical center, allowing the show to profile the co-director of the burn center and one of the burn care technicians as a change of pace from the usual ER/Trauma cases.
First-run production ended in 2002, though the show lives on in reruns on both TLC and DHC. TLC stopped producing new episodes largely because the show was expensive and time-consuming to produce in comparison to other reality shows (each episode took 4-6 months to shoot, though several film crews worked simultaneously at hospitals around the country and each hospital's shooting footage was usually split into two or three episodes). In addition, new medical privacy laws made obtaining the necessary production releases from patients more difficult, hindering the producers' abilities to edit and produce new episodes.
[edit] Controversy
Trauma was one of TLC's most controversial shows from the beginning because it did not sugar-coat or downplay the violent nature of the cases that usually end up in a big-city trauma center. The show carries a disclaimer at the beginning and on the opening frames of every return-from-commercial bumper: "Due to the graphic nature of this program, viewer discretion is advised". The warning is needed because the show does not shy away from letting the viewer see blood, guts, or even patient death. When the show debuted in 1997, such graphic presentations on television were quite rare.
Patient privacy concerns have dogged Trauma from the beginning. In 2005, two men in Florida whose cases were featured on the show sued the producers for breach of privacy, claiming show crew and producers would disguise themselves as hospital personnel to obtain release signatures for the taped footage under false pretenses. Charles Sims, an attorney for the show's producers, has dismissed the men's claims and asserted that all releases were obtained properly.[1]
