Cast members won’t all last in last season of ‘ER’

By Terry Morrow

‘ER’ may kill off at least one current regular before the series wraps.

As “ER” marches to the end of its 15th and final season, the body count will begin.

Executive producer John Wells says not all of the current cast members will be around for the series finale in 2009. He also could not deny that at least one current cast member will be killed off before the finale.

When asked if he will be killing off any of the current characters during the final season, he replied, “I don’t really want to answer that. Take that answer for what you will.”

What if Wells does kill off someone? “It would be someone whose story has played out,” he says.

But he did confirm that not all the current cast will make it through to the finale. “No, you won’t see all of the current cast there,” he says of the finale.

Noah Wyle will return to the series near the end of the season, Wells says.

He doesn’t think George Clooney, one of the original cast members, would have time to reprise his role.

“We had always planned that the end of the series would involve Noah returning because he was so central as a new character at the very beginning, an entering character growing up in the ER,” Wells says. “So we pulled out those old notes and came out with a lot of new things.”

As “ER” gets ready to mount its last season, the series is bringing aboard Angela Bassett as the new chief of the emergency room.

Despite rumors to the contrary, Wells says Bassett is not being introduced for an eventual spin-off.

Wells says no “ER” spin-offs are in the works. NBC did ask Wells once to look at spinning off the hit series, with the stories looking at other emergency rooms around the country. “Sort of like how ‘CSI’ did ‘CSI: Miami,’” he says.

Wells has had the finale thought out for years, and has even been taking notes for a while now about the subject.

“We had a series of the story lines and things that we wanted to do. I had sort of assumed at the end of season eight, that that would be about it, but we were around season six, and I started thinking about season eight.

“So I started doing some planning. I still have those notes. They’ve gotten a little old and smudged.

“... So we’re going to be talking, I think, during the season about the condition of the health-care system because it will be our last time to really comment on it.

“I would have never believed it when we had those first conversations that we would, 15 years later, not only would we have not solved things, but we have actually allowed the system to deteriorate.”