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When ER premièred in 1994, Noah Wyle was twenty-three years old, and looked it. Okay, actually, he looked younger than that -- like, about fifteen. His smart ties and oxford shirts suited him, sure, but not the way they'd suit a grown-up; it was as though he might, at some point, doff his lab coat and trade it for a navy blazer with an Exeter crest on the left breast pocket. Which, of course, was the whole point: as John Truman Carter III, Wyle's role was "Doe-Eyed Student," foil to all the veteran doctors hardened by the vagaries of struggling with the myriad challenges inherent in working at a County hospital in a time when budgetary constraints are blah blah blah blah BLAH.
In that first season, no one in the cast was a big star. George Clooney had been hacking away at his career for years, but most ER viewers probably knew him best from the latter years of The Facts of Life or his recurring role on Sisters. Sherry Stringfield had just left NYPD Blue at the end of its triumphant first season. And Anthony Edwards...well, whatever. The important thing about Anthony Edwards is that he's off the show and back where he belongs: somewhere else. Noah Wyle, like his castmates, was a relative unknown then; he'd had medium-sized roles in A Few Good Men and Swing Kids, but nothing on the order that membership in the cast of TV's #1 drama seven years running would bring. He's TV famous, like recent Fame Auditees Sarah Michelle Gellar and Matthew Perry.
As we've already observed in both the aforementioned Fame Audits, it can be very difficult for famous TV stars to separate their professional identities from their biggest TV roles -- at least, as long as they're still on the shows that made them famous (although it's a little easier to maintain some tiny degree of anonymity in a large ensemble cast, like ER's, than when you're the titular star of a series, like Gellar, or one of only six characters in a sitcom, like Perry). Especially when it comes to a long-running show, the actor's trump card is to decide to quit -- if he times it right, that is. If he leaves too early (David Caruso), he looks arrogant about his own abilities and ungrateful for the launching pad that vaulted him high enough that anyone would care what he did. If he leaves too late (Jason Priestley), he risks getting out once his show's on the decline so that, sure, now he's available to play other parts, but no one wants to give him any. Rare the actor (Clooney) who gets off the TV escalator at the top, and strolls right into a successful film career.
To tie this back to the man of the hour: Noah Wyle's ER contract expires in 2004 -- yes, over a year and nearly two full seasons from now -- and yet he has already started making noises about ditching ER. This is a big deal. Granted, the show is no longer the #1 drama series on TV (as of last year, that honour belongs to C.S.I.), but it's still firmly planted in the Nielsen top ten; one could argue that it's stayed put partly because of the continuity of its cast (unlike Law & Revolving Door-der), of which Wyle's Carter is the last remaining original character. (Sherry Stringfield, okay -- with an asterisk, since she was MIA from the show for five years.)
If Wyle makes good on his threat -- or promise, depending on how you normally spend your Thursdays at 10 -- the show's producers will have to make some major changes in order to regroup (even though certainly no one would argue that the ER would exactly be sparsely populated, suddenly, without his ass). For the first eight years, the de facto protagonist was Edwards's Mark Greene. Once Mark fled the scene (in the most hideously protracted and self-indulgent swan song in television history, can we just say), the torch was passed -- explicitly, in a typically anvilicious scene -- from Mark to Carter, the next most senior character. So if Wyle quits ER, who'll they install as the real star of the show? A woman (Stringfield, or Laura Innes)? Next most senior male doc Goran "Foreign Accentpantsovich" Visnjic -- or, as half of America probably calls him, "that Russian guy"?
And more to the point -- and yes, we promise we really do remember what that point is -- if Wyle does leave ER, how will it affect him? He isn't leaving at the optimum time; this we know, because George Clooney did, four years ago. But will it be a big old career belly-flop? Probably not -- and here, we have to give Wyle credit for choosing decent roles on which to spend his ER hiatuses. They have mostly been TV movies -- but good ones, not Lifetime-y messes adapted from the novels of Danielle Steel -- and none of his theatrical releases has been a huge moneymaker, true, but at least his roles have been interesting, and challenged him to stretch beyond the limits of his Carter cage. There was his magnetic portrayal of Steve Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley. There was the depressed son in The Myth of Fingerprints. He played a Russian translator under immense pressure in the 2000 remake of Fail Safe, and plays the foster father of a troubled young woman in the current chick fiesta White Oleander. He even dabbled in the indie arts with Donnie Darko. His biggest misstep came earlier this year, when he was comically miscast as a crooked, violent cop in the Jennifer Lopez vehicle Enough. Wyle is a decent actor, but after eight years as sensitive, doe-eyed Carter, "menace" is hard for him to sell.
Wyle has also done his career a great service by keeping his private life private. When we see him onscreen, we have no reason to think of his many romantic conquests or the crack he smokes with homeless men in Brooklyn. Sure, his years playing the gentle, nice Carter, combined with the lack of any embarrassing misdeeds in his past, may limit Wyle to playing basically decent men; then again, that's a class of roles that has done pretty well by Tom Hanks over the years.
Though he might have spent the last four years flexing his thespianic muscles Clooney-style if he and his colleague had left ER at the same time, Wyle's level of fame now is probably just about right for a transition from long-running TV drama to...whatever he ends up doing next. He has a proven track record on a tremendously popular TV series in which -- according to his own assessment, anyway -- he never did much to stick out from the large ensemble cast, making a virtue of his solid consistency. And since he's not a junkie or a lothario or a Scientologist in real life, he doesn't have a vast tower of tabloid history from which to distance himself. All of which adds up to a star who hasn't been overexposed, nor oversold. Whenever he does decide to bury John Truman Carter III, we'll be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
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