Night Patrolman said:
Maybe so, but perhaps that's one of the reasons why the show is so fun. Regardless of the production goofs, I think this show is better than most of the shows that have been on TV in the past 10 years or so.
Considering the restricted amount of training that California paramedics had back in the early days, and both actors went through a great deal of that training themselves, what was done on the show in terms of medical care was quite realistic for the time. As a young EMT when the show was in production, I loved to try to second-guess what the paramedics' on-scene diagnosis would be. And even with my limited training, I'd come awful close most of the time.
And it's a well known fact that this show alone was responsible for a lot of young people (mostly men back then) going in for paramedic training, and it's what put
EMS into a lot of fire departments....something that's considered "old hat" nowadays.
I've mentioned this story on other threads, but bears repeating here. Until 1974, a local funeral home here in Midland had been the sole ambulance provider since 1968 when the one private ambulance company moved its operation to Sweetwater, TX. By this time the oldest son of family (this was a family-operated funeral home) had been elected to the city council, and when it was proposed that a full-line
EMS system be instituted within the Midland Fire Dept, this councilman fought the city tooth-and-nail. This small operation never did a lot of funeral business, but their ambulance service kept the place going. The sad thing was that until the last couple of years of their ambulance operation, they actually ran (and got by with) one-man ambulances. They had a pair of Pontiac Consort ambulances, and they figured that was sufficient to cover a town of then-70,000. One time when I was down here for Thanksgiving (I still lived in Lubbock and had my standby ambulance service in operation) I had come down in my 1962 International Carryall ambulance that had been bought from Baker Ambulance in Odessa. My mom had gone out of town so my dad and I were "batching it" whle she was gone. We had been out to eat, and just as we walked in the house I could hear my scanner chattering loudly, so I went back to see what was going on. It turned out that a private lear-jet belonging to an oil compay based out of Denver had exploded in mid-air over a ranch about 14 mi. north of town. The funeral home responded both of their ambulances. It was stated that there were at least 25 people on board the jet; but fortunately as it turned out, all but the piolot and copilot had disembarked at the Midland Air Terminal, leaving only those two on board. So my phone rang and it was my best friend wanting to know if I was going out to the crash, so I told him to meet me outside. When we got to the scene, the older son and the dad were there in both ambulances, and the son pitched a bitch fit when we drove up: stomping his feet and acting like an idiot! The dad quickly chastised the guy and that was it! It seems that they thought our old rig was still one of Baker's and couldn't imagine how "Baker" could've gotten from Odessa to Midland quite so fast.
But the point was that had there actually been 25 people onboard the jet, there's no way that the two ambulances could've handled that, and Baker would've been called in along with some of the surrounding communities' ambulances. What was quite comical and brought the whole thing to a close came on local TV one night after the city council had voted to establish the
EMS within the fire dept. A local news anchor railed about the city council's decision saying, "Never in a hundred years will you ever see someone in an ambulance starting an IV or trying to shock a heart back into operation. That's all Hollywood hype and will never happen." I've always wondered if he ever lived that down. :undecided:
A lot of shows have come and gone over the years that have tried to duplicate or best what Emergency! did, but the closest I've seen is Chicago Fire. NBC's "Trauma" was very close, except there was too much of the soap-opera aspect in that show, which didn't last long. There's a bit of the love-triangle stuff on Chicago Fire, but I love some of their rescue scenes and how realistic everything is. I've heard that the cast actually trained with Chicago Fire Dept prior to the first taping of the show.