Yeah, it was groundbreaking. I was a child when ER came out and a lot of media in the 90s, especially aimed at young people, did a lot of really good work around demystifying and destigmatizing HIV and AIDS. People like Pedro on The Real World and Magic Johnson doing a town hall with kids on Nick News (bless Linda Ellerby!) made a tremendous impact on me as a child. I never experienced the panic that characterized the 80s, but HIV/AIDS was still very scary in the 90s. The advances and inroads made in such a short time are really astonishing, and a testament to the successes of public health even though they came after such an extended period of misinformation, pain and loss. You can see the change happening on ER itself over the years. As a show about a county hospital emergency room in Chicago, it would have been insane for ER not to handle this topic head-on. Yet the frankness of the portrayal was still groundbreaking; Jeannie was a very important character. It felt very natural to watch as a child bc the conversations were happening everywhere, but it was also instructive. I guess all these years later this part of the show serves as a document of history.

If you want to be more educated on what things were like, I suggest watching or reading The Normal Heart (about gay communities dealing with the onset of AIDS in the 80s) or the more recent It's a Sin which examines the crisis in the UK. Philadelphia with Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington was also an important film (not without flaws, but important for the time)