I stopped watching ER some years ago too, but I was thinking about something I read really early on, like the first or second season, that said Eric LaSalle liked playing Benton partly because that role hadn't been written as The Black Doctor (like Denzel Washington's character on St. Elsewhere) but instead had been written as The Arrogant Doctor, and only later cast with him, a black actor. And obviously later they were able to get into some different story lines that dealt with his identity, his relationship to his family and to the black community, and so on. (I remember this one episode where he was on the committee selecting new med students and he's pushing to say, Okay, maybe this kid's test scores aren't as good but he's had to overcome some other stuff, and that seemed to be such a struggle for his character but he was doing it, and it was really cool, or at least so it seemed to me.)
I'm just thinking about these Numbr3rs writers saying that they wrote these characters and then they happened to get Jewish actors and how it was Rob Morrow as an actor who had to push for Jewish themes to be present in the show, and how people were discussing in comments that something similar happened o X-Files, and I just. Like...
Like way too often it seems that when a Jewish character or character of color appears on these shows, it's either that the series creators 1. wrote a character with "no particular ethnicity" in mind (that is, wrote them as WASP without realizing they were writing any particular ethnicity) and cast this Jewish actor or actor of color, but then have to be seriously pushed before they'll put anything in the show that talks about this characters family or faith or community, or else 2. wrote a character as being of a certain race or ethnicity and based it on stereotypes. (Stargate Universe omg.)
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Date: 2009-01-18 03:33 am (UTC)I'm just thinking about these Numbr3rs writers saying that they wrote these characters and then they happened to get Jewish actors and how it was Rob Morrow as an actor who had to push for Jewish themes to be present in the show, and how people were discussing in comments that something similar happened o X-Files, and I just. Like...
Like way too often it seems that when a Jewish character or character of color appears on these shows, it's either that the series creators
1. wrote a character with "no particular ethnicity" in mind (that is, wrote them as WASP without realizing they were writing any particular ethnicity) and cast this Jewish actor or actor of color, but then have to be seriously pushed before they'll put anything in the show that talks about this characters family or faith or community, or else
2. wrote a character as being of a certain race or ethnicity and based it on stereotypes. (Stargate Universe omg.)
D: