No-fuss departure on 'ER' disquiets

© St. Petersburg Times,
published December 13, 2001

In case you haven't heard, one of TV's most compelling, complex, challenging and well-played characters leaves the prime time universe tonight.

His name is Dr. Peter Benton, anchor of TV's most-watched drama, ER, for the past seven years. And, as smoldering actor Eriq La Salle gives him his final bow tonight, this humble critic can't help an impertinent question:

Why haven't we heard more about this?

Sure, NBC has been running promos for the episode. But couch potatoes who remember when stars Julianna Margulies and George Clooney left the show -- in May 2000 and February 1999, respectively -- may also remember the hype that preceded their departure.

Both exits were timed during all-important "sweeps" ratings periods. (Similarly, one of the show's other founding actors, Anthony Edwards, will take his Dr. Mark Greene into the sunset in May's sweeps.) Both generated magazine covers and newspaper articles aplenty.

But La Salle seems to be taking the equivalent of a back-door exit in the doldrums of December TV programming. Most other shows are in reruns by now, following November's sweeps (indeed, even ER aired a rerun last Thursday).

An NBC publicist says Benton's exit was scheduled this month to provide space away from Greene's departure. He added that La Salle himself declined to do interviews to keep his departure from turning into "some kind of a circus."

Still, NBC found time to get ex-Family Ties star Michael Gross, who plays father to star Noah Wyle's Dr. John Carter, onto a conference call interview Monday. Couldn't they do more for a character who has been crucial to the show since its inception (and even provides a signature martial arts thrust in the show's opening credits)?

"I find (La Salle's) character to be one of the most, if not the most, compelling characters on television," said Robert Thompson, head of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. "I would put him in the same category as Andre Braugher (of NBC's Homicide: Life in the Streets). That was another one of those characters who were leaps and bounds above . . . and he was another guy who didn't get the star attention."

Of course, Braugher shares another characteristic with La Salle: Both are black men. In fact, both were black men playing complex, charismatic characters that challenged viewers in ways black actors -- so often relegated to comedies and sidekick situations -- are rarely allowed.

It's here where Benton/La Salle's absence may be most deeply felt. Other than Boston Public's Chi McBride and The Practice's Steve Harris, there is no other character of color who stands so strongly and with so little compromise -- showing a flawed black man who is neither caricature nor comedian.

"In terms of leading African-American men, he's probably the most developed character on TV," said Katie Heintz-Knowles, a children's media consultant who directs the production of an annual report on TV diversity for the activist group Children Now.

"We've seen Peter professionally, we've seen him grow personally as a father, we've seen him through different relationships . . . those are the kind of things that really draw viewers," Heintz-Knowles added. "It does go against the grain of what we see on TV, where the complex characters don't seem to be characters of color."

Like NYPD Blue's Andy Sipowicz -- the only other prime time character that can come close to matching Benton's combination of charisma and complexity -- La Salle's Peter Benton is an unlikable guy on the surface, a man whose demons and drive make him irresistible to viewers.

Benton first met viewers as a supremely confident surgeon driven to perfection. An adamant careerist who sacrificed everything to carve out a life as an up-and-coming doctor, he was a character who didn't care if audiences liked him, riding Wyle's wide-eyed intern Dr. Carter with merciless intensity to avoid inflicting another mediocre doctor on the profession.

Early on, he found friction with his working-class family, which was put off by his boundlessly self-centered ambition (including an ailing mother played by the late Beah Richards and a car mechanic brother played by Ving Rhames).

That self-centered perspective also made personal relationships difficult. His romance with Gloria Reuben's Jeanie Boulet disintegrated after she discovered she had contracted AIDS from her ex-husband.

Though he had a child with Lisa Nicole Carson's flighty restaurateur Carla Reese, their relationship was little more than physical. His romance with British Dr. Elizabeth Corday unraveled over race, and his current flame, Michael Michele's Dr. Cleo Finch, will exit the show not long after Benton does.

(This makes some sense. Finch existed solely to give Benton a romantic partner after La Salle complained that his character's only non-dysfunctional romance was with a white character. And considering how Benton always seems barely able to tolerate Finch, why would audiences care any more about her?)

"My character is not just an overachiever, he's got that God complex that surgeons have . . feeling that they're the highest of the high," La Salle -- whose own cocky, intense attitude has been compared to Benton's more than once -- said during an interview with the Detroit Free Press. "Dr. Benton is strong, arrogant, intelligent and stubborn. But most of all, he's a black man on TV who has the guts to be offensive."

As the show progressed, viewers learned more about why Benton was so driven. In one powerful scene, he told aspiring black physician Dr. Dennis Gant (Omar Epps) that he never indicated his race on application forms to prove he wasn't a token, but still felt obligated to work twice as hard as his white co-workers.

It was a rare discourse on race from a character who hardly acknowledged he was the only black male doctor in an emergency room serving the heart of America's third-largest city.

It also reflected the advice La Salle's foster mother, Ada Haynes, gave him while growing up in hardscrabble Hartford, Conn.

"That advice instills in you that life ain't fair, get over it and get on with it," said the actor (who was kicked out of the prestigious Juilliard School in the early '80s after they said he'd never overcome his inner city speech patterns) in USA Weekend. "I just say, "I can't sit on my a- and do ABC. I have to do XYZ to get noticed for ABC.' "

Indeed, it's tempting to blame race for both Benton and La Salle's lower profile. Although Clooney rode a limited repertoire of charming smiles and sultry looks onto People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive listings, La Salle showed Benton slowly learning to love his hearing-impaired son, Reese, and realizing there's more to life than success in medicine.

Some of ER's stars have said TV Guide magazine initially resisted showing La Salle on its cover, preferring to focus on the series' white actors. And La Salle's Benton was the last major character to get an episode fully devoted to his storylines -- a 1999 episode set in rural Mississippi that was actually filmed in the Orlando area.

"For black viewers, Benton quickly became both an exciting and frustrating hero," wrote Donald Bogle in his definitive book on African-Americans on television, Prime Time Blues.

"On the one hand, you had to respect the skills of this hardworking professional," Bogle noted. "Yet in an unexpected way, Peter Benton sometimes appeared to embody a familiar 1960s-style media type: the angry young black man." (True enough, that's a trait La Salle's character shares with those played by Harris, McBride and Braugher; the angry, often-physically imposing, black male).

As La Salle prepares to leave the most successful show on TV -- seemingly locked out of the sex symbol status that helped Clooney land blockbuster movies such as Batman & Robin and Ocean's Eleven -- his biggest problem might be an unexpected one.

Doing his job too well.

"He has nailed (Benton) so well, that everyone knows that face as this really unlikable and intense character," said Syracuse University's Thompson. "He's handsome enough to be a leading man. But he's going to need a role to make us forget Peter Benton."

Before the forgetting begins, viewers get one last chance tonight to bask in the scenery-chewing magnificence that is full-throttle Benton. Though NBC won't reveal specifics, the character's departure is likely to be linked to a custody battle for his son between Benton and Carla Reese's husband. (Following her highly publicized hospitalization for exhaustion last year, Carson's Carla Reese was written out of the show via a fatal car accident.)

My hope: that Benton (who isn't Reese's biological father) grabs up his son as the court battle begins to turn against him and goes on the lam. (NBC promos indicate it's more likely that a cure for Reese's deafness surfaces, perhaps a cochlear implant, that will require Benton to leave town.)

That leaves the door open for a very special episode in which Benton returns to face the music, giving those of us who have grown to love the prickly egotist some hope that we might see his face again.

It's not the kind of closure Benton or La Salle would likely insist on. But when you've had the best for this long, it's awfully tough to go cold turkey.

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