Created by best-selling author Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park), ER centers on the medical personnel in the emergency room of a Chicago hospital. Crichton is an executive producer, along with Christopher Chulack, R. Scott Gemmill and David Zabel.

A winner of the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award, the series has also earned 22 Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Drama Series in 1996, and 117 Emmy Award nominations -- holding the record for television dramas and tying NBC's "Cheers" as the all-time leading nominee in any genre. In addition, the cast has been honored with four Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Ensemble Performance in a Drama Series.

The venerated series stars Goran Visnjic (The Deep End), Maura Tierney (InsoTitleImagemnia), Mekhi Phifer (Clockers), Parminder Nagra (Bend It Like Beckham), John Stamos, (Jake in Progress, Full House), Linda Cardellini (Scooby-Doo, Freaks and Geeks), Shane West (Once and Again), Scott Grimes (Mystery, Alaska) and Laura Innes (Deep Impact) as the staff of County General Hospital, a Level One Trauma Center where heroic doctors and nurses are faced with life-and-death decisions on a daily basis.

Dr. Kerry Weaver (Innes) is a tough and determined hospital administrator, who finds herself at a personal crossroads, trying to strike a balance between her life as a doctor and the life she now wants as a woman and a mother. Also on staff are Dr. Luka Kovac (Visnjic), an ER attending physician from Croatia who is searching -- sometimes self-destructively -- for something to fill the void of his lost family and failed relationships; Abby Lockhart (Tierney), who recently made the professional transition from nurse to doctor and is making a serious effort to turn her personal life around; and Dr. Gregory Pratt (Phifer), now an attending with a checkered background that won?t stop haunting him.

Newer additions to the staff of County General Hospital include: Tony Gates (Stamos), an Iraq war veteran who makes ends meet as a paramedic, but is also a medical school student/intern at County General ; Neela Rasgotra (Nagra), a British-Indian surgical intern who arrives in Chicago after finishing her undergraduate degree in biophysics and molecular biology at Yale ; Samantha Taggart (Cardellini), a nurse and spirited single mother determined to save lives in a place where nothing is taken for granted ; Dr. Ray Barnett (West), a doctor who would sometimes rather be playing in his band than treating patients, who has a way with the ladies and a knack for making things go smoothly, most of the time; and Dr. Archie Morris (Grimes), the new attending who finds that his stringent methods don?t always agree with everyone in the ER.

ER is a production of Constant c Productions and Amblin Television in association with Warner Bros. Television.