Hollywood producer-pediatrician-activist Neal Baer will speak about television’s capacity to educate and heal at a screening of an episode of the Peabody Award-winning drama series ER at the Tate Student Center movie theater on March 17 at 7:30 p.m.
The event is free and open to the public. After the screening of “Hell and High Water,” a celebrated ER episode written by Baer and spotlighting George Clooney, the physician-producer will talk about his work and then join Horace Newcomb, director of the Peabody Awards, for a question-and-answer session.
A graduate of Harvard Medical School and a practicing pediatrician, Baer also holds master’s degrees in education and sociology from that university. His network television career began in 1988 when, after he completed a directing fellowship at the American Film Institute, he was recruited by producer-writer John Wells to write for China Beach, a dramatic series about nurses in Vietnam.
Since 2000, he has been an executive producer of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, another popular prime-time series that frequently builds stories around contemporary social issues.
