John Wells Reveals ‘ER’ Storylines He Got the Most Blowback About

John Wells is a name that many know well, given his work on TV shows including ER, Animal Kingdom, Shameless, and now The Pitt, just to name a few. And while the storylines covered on shows have changed over the years, there are some for which, when he put them on air, there were conversations behind the scenes.

“I had huge discussions during the ER days about racial storylines. ‘Could this Black character actually kiss this white character?’ This in 1998! I was like, ‘Guys, what are we even talking about?'” he revealed to The Hollywood Reporter. (Among the relationships on ER was that between Eriq La Salle and Alex Kingston‘s characters, Benton and Corday.)

He continued, “A big storyline we did in the third season of ER was Gloria Reuben‘s character being HIV positive. There were real conversations where they said, ‘So, she’s going to survive? Should she survive?’ It’s HIV. It’s terrifying. But there were already many, many people in the world dealing with it. And to suggest that anybody who becomes infected dies, that’s not the message that we wanted moving through the world.”

When TV Insider spoke with Gloria Reuben in April 2024, she told us that she was proud of her character because of what portraying Jeanie’s journey meant.

“She was really brave and was navigating a terrain that no one else had before on television and certainly in that hospital, being HIV positive, being a married professional woman of color who contracted HIV from her husband in the mid-’90s, that on its own was groundbreaking,” she shared. “It really helped blow open the doors about who gets HIV and how they get it and all of that.”

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The show portrayed Jeanie as a wife, as a physician assistant (who fought to get her job back at one point), and as someone who didn’t stay with her husband, Al (Michael Beach), but then found love again. Reuben called that “intense and beautiful at the same time.”

What especially stood out was “how it helped reduce the stigma and the shame and the misinformation about HIV and AIDS for all time. And I have to say that one of the things that I’m most proud of, if not the most proud of, is that Jeanie Boulet walked out of that ER,” she explained. “She did not die from AIDS. She walked out of that ER after having remarried and adopted a baby. Because you know what? At that time, late ‘90s medicine was helping people. It was literally giving people with HIV their lives back, many of them. So we were like, and I specifically was like, she’s going to walk out of there alive. She came back a number of years later [in Season 14]. Jeanie Boulet, I’m so proud of myself. I know I sound a little arrogant, but I really, it’s the bigger thing of it all.”

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