EXCLUSIVE: Trauma: Life in the ER was one of the first unscripted series to air in the U.S. alongside other reality pioneers such as The Real World.
The show ran for seven seasons on TLC from 1997 to 2002, was nominated for seven Emmys and spawned spinoffs including Paramedics and Code Blue.
The huge success of another Emmy-winning show, HBO Max’s The Pitt, has now opened the door for its potential return.
Truly Original, the Banijay-backed production company run by Glenda Hersh and Steven Weinstock, has held talks about bringing back the operation and has even spoken to possible hospitals for access.
The series, which came in the wake of the success of NBC’s ER, followed people coming through Level One trauma centers and high-profile emergency rooms around the U.S.
Hersh and Weinstock produced the show during their time at New York Times Television, which they ran before starting their own production company True Entertainment.
“Right now, look at the The Pitt. We did the reality version of that show [20] years ago on TLC and it was their number one-rated show for almost ten years. We would go into a trauma one center for two weeks with small cameras, producers and videographers and compress what was going on, find the right characters and put a bit of rock n roll music to it,” Weinstock told Deadline.
“It was one of the first reality shows,” Hersh added, “It was really the first sort of show that was a verité, follow-job reality show, and then it spawned really the whole cable universe of those shows. Everybody else jumped into that next and started creating these shows and that became what populated cable. It was really the first of its kind and it was the real Pitt.”
TLC is seemingly interested in bringing it back. “[They] make a monthly call to me to say, ‘Can we bring it back?’ I was just meeting with some hospital the other day to talk about it,” she added.
However, one of the challenges in 2026 is patient rights. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was only signed into law in 1996. “It’s just a little tricky now, because of HIPAA. We did get releases from every single person who appeared, nothing comes without consent. It’s just more complicated now; the privacy issues are overwhelming.”
The pair, whose company makes shows including Bravo’s Summer House and The Real Housewives of Atlanta, is working on a way to make the show under the current rules.
“Maybe if we do a big, broader hospital [reality] drama, it can 100% be done with some emergency, just hard to have as much,” Hersh added.
They joked that they were even featured in a live episode of ER. The fourth season of the George Clooney and Noah Wyle-led drama series was shown through the perspective of a PBS documentary crew.
“They used to call us all the time for material,” Hersh said. “We would see stuff that we had in our show up as a version on ER and we’d have a good laugh.”
Truly Original also produces Swamp People, which follows alligator hunters in the Atchafalaya River Basin and is in Season 17 for History.
Despite the return of shows like Duck Dynasty, which returned to A&E last year, these male-skewing shows, or occu-soaps as Weinstock calls them, have struggled in recent years.
“The male factual space is definitely not the flavor of the year. It’s definitely a contracting marketplace. But we’ve all been in this for so long that there might be something that comes along that breaks through and becomes a hit and suddenly that does become a more popular space again,” added Hersh. “We’re hopeful.”
