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Dr. Douglas "Doug" Ross is a fictional pediatrics physician from the television series ER. He is portrayed by George Clooney.

History[]

Early life[]

In "Summer Run", which is set in early 1996, Doug's father states that Doug is 34 years old. This takes place shortly after Doug celebrates his birthday in episode 14, indicating that Doug was born in early 1962.

Doug Ross was raised by his mother, Sarah, in Kentucky after his father, Ray, abandoned their family. When his mother remarried, she moved with Doug to the Chicago area where he was a varsity basketball player for Augusta High School. Doug says in "Long Day's Journey" that he was short in high school and played a similar style of basketball to later Chicago Bulls star B.J. Armstrong.

Doug revealed that his father came back to his family a few times but was never committed to them. Doug attended college at an unknown institution, most likely from 1980 to 1984, then spent four years in medical school in Seattle (presumably at the University of Washington, as this is the only medical school in the Seattle area).

Following completion of his residency in 1992, Doug became a pediatric fellow at County General. It is not revealed whether Doug's residency took place at County General as well.

In Season 1, he revealed to a patient that he had a son, and he tells nurse Wendy that he doesn't know his son's name as he's never seen him.

ER executive producer John Wells told TVLine in 2019, “There are people among us who lose track of their children…[George and I] talked about it at the time. We both know people, know men, who had children that they have no contact with for whatever reason. That’s what we were trying to play with.”

He went on to explain that Doug’s guilt over how he reacted to having a child as a young man is part of the reason that he became a pediatrician.

Despite his jumbled personal life, Ross is committed to medicine and children — and to helping no matter the rules or consequences.

During Season 2, in the episode "Hell and High Water", Doug rescued a boy trapped in a flooding storm drain during a rainstorm. His heroic efforts were filmed on local television, thus making him a media star.

This event helped him earn back his job at County, as his supervisor in pediatrics wasn't going to renew his fellowship because of his disrespect for authority. The hospital administration forced the supervisor to offer Doug a deal to return, which he accepted.

Also during season 2, Doug's father tries to reconcile with him. However, Doug has difficulty reconnecting with the man who abandoned him and his mother. Ray has made something of himself by owning a very ritzy hotel in Chicago, and Doug lets his guard down a little, but is disappointed yet again when his father offers to take him to a Bulls game and then stands him up.

Doug later reveals that the reason he is so finicky about child abuse is because he and his mother were abused by his father.

Doug has an affair with Ray's girlfriend, a woman who Ray stole money from, but ends the relationship when it becomes clear she has a lot of problems herself. Doug gets a phone call one day informing him of his father's passing, and that someone would need to pick up the cremated remains. He agrees, and goes to California on a road trip with friend and colleague Dr. Mark Greene.

Ross finds out that his father was killed in an automobile accident; he had been drunk at the wheel and killed the other driver, himself, and his new wife. Doug visits the funeral ceremony to express his sorrow to the victim's family, but ultimately does not and tells the priest overseeing the ceremony that his father was responsible.

When Doug and Mark find the hotel where his father stayed, he finds his father's car and belongings. They discover home movies that Ray had taken of Doug and his mother. Later on, Doug finds his girlfriend, nurse Carol Hathaway, waiting for him, and the two kiss passionately.

Doug is a womanizer, who has dated and left many women throughout the course of the show. Doug's womanizing days come to an abrupt end after a one-night stand with an epileptic woman who hides her condition and dies in the ER. Doug never even knew her name until after she died.

Doug stops dating for awhile until he gets back together with Carol. Doug has an on-again, off-again relationship with Carol Hathaway, the head nurse of the ER at County.

In season one, he is visibly distraught when she attempts suicide and is brought into the ER on a gurney. However, he doesn’t visit her for eight weeks afterwards, worried that the attempt was his fault due to his cheating behavior.

When she returns to work, his feelings for her rise to the surface. He asks her to date again, but she tells him no, as she is with Tag.

However, eventually, Doug and Carol do become a couple. While Carol wants to take things slow, they become engaged and eventually try for a baby.

Ultimately, Doug’s attempts to help his patients go too far - leading to reprisals and the closure of Carol’s clinic - and he decides to leave Chicago for Seattle halfway into Season 5. Carol at first decides not to go with him to Seattle, wanting him to stay in Chicago for her.

After Doug leaves, Carol learns that she is pregnant with his twin girls. She sends him a fax to let him know, but tells him to stay in Seattle, not wanting the pregnancy to be the only reason he returns.

Their daughters are born on Thanksgiving Day. She names them Tess and Kate Ross. In the episode, it is implied that she called Doug after their birth.

Doug is seen in the Season 6 episode "Such Sweet Sorrow", in which Carol Hathaway leaves Chicago to reunite with him. She finds him working on his boat behind his house in Seattle and the two embrace and kiss. It is later revealed in Season 8 that Hathaway sent for the twins the next day and has been living with Ross in Seattle ever since.

In season 15, Doug and Carol are shown to be working together at a hospital in Seattle. They are both wearing wedding rings and talk about their now school aged daughters.

Season 1[]

In the pilot episode, Doug is brought into the ER not long before his shift to be "treated" for drunkenness by his longtime friend, Dr. Mark Greene. Doug had a previous relationship with Nurse Carol Hathaway which later ended. After Carol attempts suicide, Doug blames himself for what happened to her.

In an episode, Doug revealed to a patient that he had a son. When Carol announces she's getting married to Dr. Tagileri, Doug appears to be a little jealous. Doug dated a woman from Risk Management named Diane Leeds, who has a son named Jake, but their relationship later ends. In the episode "The Birthday Party", Doug assaults the father of an abused girl and he is sent to counseling.

Season 2[]

Doug's reckless professional behavior is called into question by the hospital authorities and the new Chief Resident, Kerry Weaver. Doug breaks protocol to treat an HIV-positive child and is about to be fired. Doug already accepted a job at another medical facility when he heroically saves the life of a young boy who was trapped in a sewer. This gives Doug a lot of public attention, earns him an award and also saves his job.

In the episode "The Right Thing", Doug's father, Ray, visits him, hoping to reconcile with Doug, but Doug has difficulty reconnecting with him. Ray has made something of himself by owning a very ritzy hotel in Chicago, and Doug lets his guard down a little, but is disappointed yet again when his father offers to take him to a Bulls game and then stands him up.

Doug later reveals the reason why he is so finicky about child abuse is because he and his mother were abused by his father. Doug later has an affair with Ray's girlfriend, a woman who Ray stole money from, but ends the relationship when it becomes clear she has a lot of problems herself.

Season 3[]

Doug and Carol's relationship appears to start up again. Doug cares for a homeless teen prostitute named Charlie Chiemienga. Near the end of the season, Doug appears to clash with new pediatrician, Dr. Anna Del Amico. He finds Mark beaten in the men's restroom and helped treated him along with Weaver.

Season 4[]

Doug and Carol's relationship has rekindled and they talk about being engaged. When Doug's fellowship is about to end soon, he is determined to become the first emergency pediatric attending at County.

Doug gets a phone call and finds out that his father, Ray was killed in a car accident. Doug goes to California on a road trip with friend and colleague Dr. Mark Greene to collect his remains. Ross finds out that his father was killed in an automobile accident; he had been drunk at the wheel and killed the other driver, himself and his new wife.

Doug visits the funeral ceremony to express his sorrow to the victim's family, but ultimately does not and tells the priest overseeing the ceremony that his father was responsible, who then reassures Doug that he truly loved his father. When Doug and Mark find the hotel his father stayed in, he finds his father's car and belongings. They discover home videos that Ray had taken of Doug and his mother.

Season 5/Departure[]

After a month on probation following the unauthorized rapid detox of a drug-addicted baby, Doug gets the position as the ER pediatric attending. Doug and Carol's relationship is still going strong and they are even trying to get pregnant.

Doug treats a young boy named Ricky Abbott, who was suffering from ALD. He jeopardizes a new pain medication study by surreptitiously giving some of the drug to Ricky. Mark and Kerry find out, but they decide not to tell Dr. Anspaugh because of the violation of protocol on a federally-funded trial.

In the episode, "The Storm: Part 1", Doug and Jeanie Boulet end up in a car accident as Doug tries to get to the scene of a school bus accident. Doug only suffers a head laceration. In the same episode, Doug gets in trouble once again after he allows Ricky's mother, Joi to bypass the lockouts on a Dilaudid PCA machine, which enabled her to give a lethal dose of medication to Ricky which leads to his death. After Ricky's death, Doug faces possible criminal charges and suspension. The incident also causes Carol's ER free clinic to close down.

A friend of Doug's stands up for him and the charges against him are dropped, but Doug resigns from the hospital and plans to move to Seattle. He asks Carol to move to Seattle with him, but Carol declines to and Doug leaves Chicago alone, but shares his final drinks with his best friend Mark Greene before leaving.

After departure[]

Warner Bros. Television, the studio which produces ER for NBC, kept Dr. Ross's cameo in "Such Sweet Sorrow" a secret from NBC. The network promoted the episode as Carol Hathaway's goodbye, with no mention of Dr. Ross's appearance.

In fact, the original version of "Such Sweet Sorrow" that Warner Bros. sent to NBC ended right after the scene where we see Hathaway on the plane to Seattle. At the 11th hour, Warner Bros. messengered an "edited" version of the episode to NBC headquarters in New York for broadcast — NBC had no time to preview the episode prior to airing what turned out to be an extended episode in which Clooney appears.

NBC was miffed that it was kept in the dark as it lost valuable ad revenue it could have generated if it had aired promos that the episode would mark the return of George Clooney. Clooney cited the fans of the show for his reason as to why he agreed to make the cameo (he wanted Hathaway and Ross's characters to get back together, as most fans always had hoped for). Clooney reportedly only asked to be paid the required Screen Actors Guild rate for the cameo.

In the 11th season finale "The Show Must Go On", Dr. Ross was briefly shown in a photograph that was part of a slide show at Carter's farewell party.

In the season 14 episode, "Status Quo", Jeanie Boulet mentions Doug and Carol when she returns to the ER. Nurse Haleh Adams states that they are living happily in Seattle and that their daughters are now in 3rd grade.

In the season 15 episode at the end of the episode "The Book of Abby", long-serving nurse Haleh Adams shows the departing Dr. Abby Lockhart a closet wall where all the past doctors and employees have put their locker name tags. Amongst them, the tag "Ross" can be seen. The same happens again during "Shifting Equilibrium", when Dr. Neela Rasgotra puts her own name tag on the wall.

Doug Ross appears again in the Season 15 episode "Old Times". He and Carol are now married and practice at the University of Washington Medical Center, where Doug is an attending physician. During the episode, Doug and Carol help a grieving grandmother (Susan Sarandon) donate her grandson's organs.

One of the organs, a kidney, is given to "some doctor", unbeknownst to both Doug and Carol that it is their former co-worker and friend, John Carter. While on the job he met the two current employees at Cook County General Hospital, Neela Rasgotra & Sam Taggart.

Career[]

In the pilot episode, which takes place on St. Patrick's Day 1994, Dr. Ross is brought into the ER not long before his shift to be "treated" for drunkenness by his longtime friend, Dr. Mark Greene. Throughout the next few seasons, Doug is shown to be compassionate, though not always using the best judgment.

As a pediatrician, he deals primarily with children. His love for kids is best seen during darker situations, such as when a child is in danger. When Peter Benton talks about how surgeons deal with emotionally charged cases and ER doctors have it easy, Doug leaves him stunned into silence when describing cases that include a young girl who beat her mother to death, a kid who is going to lose his leg to cancer and another kid who is dying from a life of homelessness.

Doug’s lack of judgment leads to him going as far as to assault a person who has abused a child in the ER, but his counseling in that case just consisted of the shrink telling him not to do that again.

He is a passionate doctor who puts the welfare of his patients, especially children, above his medical career. In one episode, Dr. Ross saves a young boy who is drowning and is flown in to County General using a news helicopter. This garners him much attention, earns him an award and saves his job.

Doug doesn't handle authority well, even when his best friend, Dr. Mark Greene is his boss.

Doug is a pediatrician, but in several episodes, has performed medical procedures on adults, usually when the other doctors are busy.

In one episode, Doug learns that one of his young patients, an athlete, is stressed out about being secretly gay. Doug initially seems uncomfortable with talking to the boy, who leaves the hospital without revealing what's troubling him.

In another episode, he tries to do an ultra-rapid detox on a drug-addicted baby without the mother's consent. This procedure is assisted by Carol, but when Greene and Weaver discover the procedure being done in violation of hospital policy and the law, he is punished.

He was left on probation for 30 days, and was supervised by Kerry Weaver and Dr. Greene, who had to co-sign his charts. Doug's attitude towards patient treatment often has consequences for his coworkers and supervisors, who have received reprimands from their superiors for Doug's actions.

He vies to be an attending physician for emergency pediatrics. He eventually gets the job, even though Doctors Greene and Weaver opposed his promotion because the position wasn't necessary and the funds were needed elsewhere. Mark was ultimately happy for Doug but Kerry was aghast and rallied against his new position.

He eventually resigns in the aftermath of a scandal in which he shows a mother how to bypass the lockouts on a Dilaudid PCA, enabling her to give a lethal dose of medication to her terminally ill son.

Doug had earlier stolen medication from a pain medication study and given it to the mother, only to be discovered by Weaver and Mark, who reprimanded him, but kept the incident private. The incident also prompts the closure of Carol's free clinic in the hospital, since it supplied the PCA to the mother, and Doug faces suspension from work at County, as well as possible criminal charges.

A friend of Doug's stands up for him and the charges against him are dropped, but Doug resigns from the hospital and plans to move to Seattle. As a result, when Doug leaves, he and Carol are on poor terms until she discovers she's pregnant with his twin girls. Her clinic is later re-opened, but Carol is no longer allowed to be in charge.

Dr. Doug Ross was written out of the series because Clooney wished to focus more on his now expanding film career. He also said that there wasn't any strong story in place for his character after Season 5. He appeared at the end of the penultimate episode of season 6, when Carol left Cook County to reunite with Ross in Seattle.

He was reportedly asked to return briefly in season 8, to make an appearance in Anthony Edwards' last episode during Dr. Mark Greene's funeral, but Clooney declined because he did not want his cameo appearance to overshadow the departure of a beloved character on the show.

In an interview with TV Guide, original ER cast member Noah Wyle, who worked alongside Clooney for five seasons, revealed that Clooney was returning to ER for its 15th and final season in 2009. His new arc began in Episode 328, titled "Old Times", with Julianna Margulies also returning as Carol Hathaway.

Behind the Scenes[]

Before ER, Clooney was recognized by many for his brief stint on the hit show Roseanne. Upon auditioning for the role of Doug, his career was rather stagnant, and being in his 30s, it seemed unlikely that he would venture into anything else other than television roles.

As the first season rolled along, fans and critics agreed that he was the shows breakout star. Movie roles began to be offered to Clooney beginning in the second season, and despite accepting those roles, he refused to take time off from the show, doing both jobs simultaneously out of loyalty to ER. Due to this, there were periods throughout his run on the show that he worked seven days a week.

However, it became clear to producers that it was no longer a matter of “if” he would leave the show, but “when”, as more roles began to be offered to him, and it would be impossible for him to do both movies and television simultaneously for very much longer. They also became aware that if he did stay on the show, his growing star power in the movie industry would possibly create an issue with his salary on the show.

With the schedule becoming more of an issue, and no strong stories in place for his character, he agreed that it was time to leave ER and take his growing movie career to the next step. He let his contract not be renewed and stayed on until his character was properly written off during the fifth season.

Relationships[]

Romantic[]

Carol Hathaway[]

Friendships[]

Mark Greene[]

Susan Lewis[]

Gallery[]

The ER Wiki has a collection of images and media related to Doug Ross.

References[]

External links[]


ER Characters
Characters Mark GreeneDoug RossSusan LewisJohn CarterCarol HathawayPeter BentonJeanie BouletKerry WeaverAnna Del AmicoElizabeth CordayLucy KnightLuka KovačAbby LockhartCleo FinchDave MalucciJing-Mei ChenMichael GallantGreg PrattNeela RasgotraSamantha TaggartRay BarnettArchie MorrisTony GatesSimon BrennerCate Banfield
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