YOU SET THE TONE, CARTER: Thursday night, Noah Wyle leaves 'ER' after eleven seasons as Dr. John Carter, leaving S. Epatha Merkerson (Lt. Anita van Buren) of 'Law and Order', I believe, as the longest-running series regular on tv. (ER's Yvette Freeman and Deezer D have also been there since day one with Carter.)
Anyway, without Carter, there would have been no 'ER' -- he was the newbie through which we learned the hospital world, a curious mix of naivete and privilege who always remembered that there existed moral standards beyond mere hospital rules.
He's been stabbed, addicted to painkillers and, perhaps most regrettably, grown a beard to denote his seriousness.
More than any other character on the show, I think of Carter (do you ever think of him as "John"?) in terms of his relationships with others -- his "Gamma", his cousin Chase, and his many loves (and almost loves) on the show -- Harper Tracy, Anna Del Amico, Abby Keaton, Susan Lewis, Rena (the teenager), Lucy Knight, the cancer patient played by Rebecca de Mornay, Liz (the one with a doctor fixation and gonorrhea), Abby Lockhart, Roxanne (the volleyball-playing insurance saleswoman), Wendall, and now, finally, Kem.
But the most important relationship for Carter was the first: Dr. Peter Benton. Through the two of them, we saw the complexities of a mentor/mentee relationship between two men whose for each other was occasionally in doubt, rarely vocalized, and always central to our understanding as to how modern hospitals worked. What made 'ER' special in those early days was the way in which we understood the various institutional and ethical pressures on the doctors and nurses. It wasn't always the tepid soap opera is now; it used to be a serious drama about work, told at the breathtaking pace of real life.
My favorite Carter-Benton moment was the one I'd like to think of as their last together, even though I know it wasn't: Carter's drug intervention, and the flight to Atlanta. Because, dammit, Benton cared, and six seasons of character build-up actually meant something. I miss that 'ER', a show in which our emotional investments in the characters paid off, where our expectations weren't slashed for cheap effect by a wayward helicopter.
Noah Wyle is just 34, and theoretically, he has a long career ahead of him, though I can't imagine him as not-John Carter. If he does nothing else, still, dayenu. For eleven years, Carter was enough for us.
edited to add this, plus some more former Carter flings: Matt Zoller Seitz of the Newark Star-Ledger adds his thoughts: "Wyle gave the character an emotional, intellectual and philosophical consistency, and a depth that let us deduce what he was thinking and feeling even when he wasn't speaking. Wyle never lost track of Carter's essence. He played Carter as an American aristocrat who felt guilty over being born rich, yet who was too considerate and classy to make that guilt a matter of public record, and too well-bred to involve even his lovers and close friends in his private troubles, no matter how grim things got. . . . Wyle made you aware, on an almost subliminal way, that Carter was doing penance for his family's wealth. There were times when he seemed to embrace misfortune, as if he felt he did not deserve to be as smart and decent as he was as if these qualities were another form of inherited wealth. These character traits were rarely spelled out in dialogue, but they were there, and if you paid attention to Carter, you saw and appreciated them. "
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