George Clooney, Busy With Haiti Relief, Skips Critics' Choice Awards

This is just the kind of guy George Clooney is.

The Oscar winner, nominated at tonight's Critics' Choice Awards for Best Actor for his performance in Up in the Air, was missing in action. His empty seat was made noticeable when Jason Reitman singled out Clooney's brilliance  while accepting the honor for Best Adapted Screenplay.

We hear that Clooney opted to skip the kudosfest to meet with Wyclef Jean, with whom he's organizing next week's star-studded telethon to raise funds for earthquake relief in Haiti, where a 7.0 temblor pretty much leveled the capital city of Port-au-Prince on Tuesday.

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'ER' finale draws 16.4 million TV viewers

NBC hospital drama "ER" ended its 15-year run by drawing 16.4 million viewers for its final episode, the highest viewership for a drama finale since 1996, the U.S. network said on Friday.

The two-hour show on Thursday night brought back "ER" alumni Noah Wyle and Eriq La Salle, as the staff at County General Hospital in Chicago treated a dying woman in labor, an AIDS patient and a comatose teenager with alcohol poisoning.

The last scene showed emergency room staff wheeling in burn victims from a plant explosion as Chicago's famous elevated train passed overhead, giving audiences the sense that while a TV show may end, life goes on.

The 16.4 million figure was the highest for a U.S. drama finale since the CBS show "Murder, She Wrote" in 1996, which drew 16.5 million viewers, NBC (GE.N) said.

Earlier on Friday the network said the show had drawn 16.2 million viewers.

Throughout its run on U.S. television, "ER" boosted the careers of actors like Wyle, La Salle and George Clooney, who played Dr. Doug Ross on the show until 1999.

The late author Michael Crichton created the series in 1994, drawing on his experiences as a medical student at a busy hospital emergency department.

As original cast members bowed out, they were replaced by the likes of John Stamos, Angela Bassett and Maura Tierney, and viewership slipped.

The show recently had attracted fewer than 8 million viewers per episode. But at the height of its popularity in the mid-1990s it was the top-rated drama in the United States.

Its highest viewership was in 1998 when 25.8 million people tuned in after the finale of NBC comedy "Seinfeld."

Comedies often have enjoyed higher viewership than dramas in their finales. "Friends" had 52.5 million viewers for its last episode in 2004, and 76.3 million people watched the finale of "Seinfeld," NBC said.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/mediaNews/idUKN0336286120090403?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0

Will the ratings boost George Clooney gave 'ER' help with Emmy voters?

The return of George Clooney to "ER" on Thursday gave the long-running medical drama its best rating in two years. NBC says 10.7 million people tuned in to catch up on what had happened to George Clooney's character since we last saw Doug Ross at the end of Season 6. While Clooney had left the show at the end of the fifth season when his contract expired, he returned then to film a cameo that saw him reuniting with on-again, off-again love Carol Hathaway (Julianna Margulies) in Seattle.

Thursday's episode came almost nine years after that last appearance and we learned that the pair are now happily married and working together at a hospital in Seattle. While they delicately dealt with a grandmother (Susan Sarandon) deciding whether to donate the organs of her dying grandson, another fan favorite — Eriq La Salle as Peter Benton — was seen once more in a Chicago hospital. In a nice touch, he tended to his one-time student John Carter (Noah Wyle) as he underwent a kidney transplant.

Though those ratings are respectable enough in today's 100-plus channel universe — especially for a show finishing its 15th season — they are a far cry from the staggering numbers that "ER" used to get. For those first five seasons with George Clooney onboard, the show averaged an audience of just less than 30 million. Even for the next five seasons, the Thursday night staple still averaged a viewership of almost 22 million. Beginning with Season 11, the medical drama dropped out of the top 10. Last year — Season 14 — saw viewership fall below 10 million for the first time. Even though "ER" came in at only No. 54, that still put it in on a par with Emmy contenders such as "Boston Legal" (No. 51) and "Ugly Betty" (No. 53).

However, with the decline in ratings came a corresponding drop in Emmy attention. Over the course of its first 14 years, "ER" has amassed a record 122 Emmy nominations, with 22 wins. Beginning with its first season, it earned seven consecutive bids for best drama series, winning for Season 2 in 1996. But no regular cast member has been nominated for an Emmy since Season 7 when Maura Tierny contended for supporting actress. (She lost to Allison Janney for "The West Wing.") And the show has earned only 22 of its total Emmy nods since then, winning two tech awards and the guest actor Emmy for Ray Liotta in Season 11. While Tierney left "ER" at the beginning of this season, she is slated to return in this week's episode.

http://goldderby.latimes.com/awards_goldderby/2009/03/george-cloone-1.html

Clooney's quiet "ER" return boosts show ratings

George Clooney quietly returned to "ER" in a long-awaited appearance that gave the TV hospital drama its best viewership ratings in two years as the show nears its final emergency.

Clooney, 47, donned his Dr. Doug Ross scrubs one more time along with his TV wife Julianna Marguiles (nurse Carol Hathaway) in an episode broadcast on Thursday that also featured old-timers Noah Wyle (Dr. John Carter) and Eriq La Salle (Dr. Peter Benton).

Although barely promoted by NBC, the episode saw a 23 percent increase in audiences over last week's show, whose 15th and final season ends next month.

NBC, which is currently lagging in bottom place among the four major U.S. networks, said the 10.7 million Americans who tuned in gave "ER" its best ratings since Feb 2007.

"ER" turned Clooney into an international heart-throb and he left in 1999 to pursue a movie career full time. He returned for a brief, surprise cameo in May 2000 but had repeatedly said he was not interested in going back again.

Anthony Edwards, whose character Dr. Mark Greene, died of brain cancer in 2002, has already returned for the final season in flashback scenes along with Laura Innes (Dr. Weaver) and Paul McCrane (Dr. Romano).

The ground-breaking series, set in the emergency room of a fictional Chicago hospital, was the top-rated drama on U.S. in the mid-1990s but audiences have slipped sharply in recent years.

http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSTRE52C64820090313