Hulu Makes Deal to Keep Iconic NBC Series

ER fans watching the iconic medical drama on Hulu will not have to worry about switching to a new streaming platform to finish watching all 331 episodes. Hulu has renewed its streaming deal to keep the show on the Disney-owned platform, PopCulture.com learned Tuesday. The show joined the Hulu lineup in January 2018 after the service struck a deal with Warner Bros. Domestic Television.

At first, it was thought that Hulu would be losing the show because the 2018 deal only covered four years. ER also appeared on HBO Max's "What's New" list and will show up on WarnerMedia's platform on Jan. 14. However, since Hulu extended its contract, the show will be available on both platforms.

ER was created by novelist Michael Crichton and debuted on NBC in September 1994. It was one of the biggest television hits of the 1990s and continued until April 2009. ER finished with 331 episodes over 15 seasons and is the second-longest-running primetime medical drama, surpassed only by Grey's Anatomy. ER made superstars out of George Clooney, Anthony Edwards, Julianna Margulies, Noah Wyle, and many other members of its ensemble cast.

The series is set at the fictional County General Hospital in Chicago. The show won 116 Primetime Emmy Awards, including the Oustanding Drama Series award in 1996. The cast also won the Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series award at the Screen Actors Guild Awards every year from 1996 to 1999.

In April, Clooney, Margulies, Wyle, Edwards, Ming-Na Wen, and many other members of the cast had a virtual reunion as part of the Stars in the House virtual series. Clooney and Margulies suggested it would be too hard to recapture the magic of the original series with a revival. "When you look at the show, it'd be hard to say that we could do it [again] at the level that we did it," Clooney said, reports TVLine. "Because boy, I've actually been watching it a bit because my wife's been watching it, which is very odd, and I have to say, it's such great television." He called the Season 1 episode "Love's Labor Lost" "as good a piece of television as I've ever seen... It's hard to catch lightning again."

Despite its success, ER never turned into a franchise like Law & Order. "All those shows figured out how they could brand themselves and replicate the model in a different city and get a different show out of it, and I always thought it was classy that we never tried to do that," showrunner John Wells said in April.