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Mar 20

Kellie Martin & ER

I’ve been trying to figure out what my motivation is for putting all this together and writing about it, since I’m talking about something which happened over two decades ago, does not involve me, and, sad as it is, is likely very typical in the television industry.

But I think this topic frustrates me because I dislike the framing that often gets applied when it comes up and also because a lot of people seem to be understandably misinformed about some details of what seems to have happened. So I think the reason I feel compelled to write about it is firstly to correct the record on a couple of things, and also to express some of my feelings about it. I don’t expect everyone to agree with all of my inferences, or share my feelings, and that’s okay. But I hope that even if people completely disagree with my perspective and discard that part of this post at least maybe by putting all the quotes and sources pertaining to this in one place I can correct some misinformation.

I want to be clear from the outset this isn’t about ‘cancelling’ Noah Wyle or litigating whether or not he is a “good person” and I’m not trying to pick a fight with his fans. A lot of what I want to try to highlight isn’t so much about him personally as it is about media and fandom narratives that I find aggravating, but unfortunately since a large part involves discussing Noah’s historical behaviour and his own statements about it I’m aware it’s inevitably going to be taken as ax-grinding by some people and there’s not a lot I can do about that. This also is not about shipping but I am going to have to talk about Carter and Lucy because of the way Noah’s attitude towards the relationship is related to his behaviour towards Kellie.

So for some historical context: Kellie Martin was brought onto ER during season five, which aired from September 1998 through to May 1999. This was a period of change for the show, with George Clooney leaving in the 5.14-5.15 two-parter “The Storm” which aired over February sweeps. The rest of the original cast were also making decisions about their future with the show: Julianna Margulies left at the end of season six, Anthony Edwards and Eriq La Salle both left in season eight. (My understanding is that the original cast of the show were all contracted for a base of six seasons with an option to extend for a further two, but that Clooney was released from his contract early as was Sherry Stringfield who left in season two—meaning the producers were heavily incentivised to try to keep original cast members happy at this specific point in the show’s run in order to retain them.)

Kellie was brought onto the show with some fanfare as she was already considered a television “veteran” at the age of 22, having started acting when she was seven. She had previously starred in the ABC series Life Goes On with Patti LuPone, which earned her an Emmy nomination at the age of 17, and she had led the CBS series Christy with Tyne Daly. She has a writing credit on a season two episode of Christy which was developed based on an idea she brought to the producers of that show when she was 19.

All that to say that Kellie being brought onto ER was generally considered something of a big deal, and treated as such in their casting announcement:

“Kellie is a very experienced young actor who we’ve had out (sic) eye on for some time,” said “ER” executive producer Lydia Woodward. “We’re thrilled to have her join the cast.” (Variety, June 30th, 1998)

Martin, 22, will join NBC’s ER in the fall as Lucy Knight, a third-year medical student at Chicago's County General. The youngest member of ER's cast didn't have to audition for the role. The producers went to her. “We had known of her work, and all of us were fans,” Lydia Woodward, one of four ER executive producers, said in an interview Monday. “When we were thinking of bringing on a new character, a student, she was the first person who came to mind.” (Tampa Bay Times, July 2nd 1998)

The fact that Kellie had not been required to audition was well-publicised and mentioned in contemporary profiles. She had been taking an education break from acting at the time and studying for a degree at Yale when she received the phone call from John Wells inviting her to be on the show:

Q: Congratulations on ER, that’s a great job. A: You know, it’s probably the best job in the world. Q: They just called you up, you were at school, and they said, “How would you like to be a regular on ER?” A: My mom called me and said, “What would you like to be doing right now?” I said, “Anything but studying for this test,” and they said, “Would you like to a regular on ER?” Like, “Yeah! Sure!”

(Late Night With Conan O’Brien, February 2nd 1999)

(Cosmopolitan, May 1999)

(TV Guide, August 1999)

Per Kellie, speaking to Worst Podcast Ever in November 2019 the phone call had come several months after a meeting with John Wells, which comports with Lydia Woodward’s contemporary statements that the producers had been following her career.

That was actually from a general meeting with John Wells. I don’t remember if I wanted to meet him or he wanted to meet me but I ended up in a room with him and we were, like, talking for an hour and a half. He collected photography so that’s kind of like how we bonded. I didn’t—you know, whatever. General meeting, had a lovely time. And then months later I got a call at school that they wanted to add me to ER.

Kellie also explained that the idea was to do a soft reboot of the show through a medical student’s eyes, something which is immediately obvious to anyone familiar with ER. Most will remember that Noah Wyle’s character John Carter was presented as the audience surrogate in the pilot episode of the show, a position Kellie’s character of Lucy Knight is placed in for her introductory episode 5.01 “Day For Knight”. This was also the PR line around Lucy’s introduction:

“She’s very ambitious, she’s very smart. But she hasn’t a clue what she's doing when she gets to the ER,” says Martin. “She's great at book learning. But she can’t put in an IV. You see Lucy’s first day in the ER, and it’s a nightmare.” “Sort of like the young, fumbling John Carter (Noah Wyle) when ER began four years ago. And that’s the point,” says Martin. ER producer John Wells wanted a new infusion of that youthful sawbones energy. “Carter is my resident, so I follow him around. He was naive at the beginning. And that’s my character now,” says Martin, 23, who took a break from her art history studies at Yale to join ER. (Detroit Free Press, September 24th 1998)

As Kellie mentioned she appears in every scene that episode, something which illustrates the faith the producers had in her knowing that she was no neophyte.

Q: I remember the announcement of you going on the show and they, like. I mean it was like a huge deal to get you, first of all. Well, the press— A: I don’t think so! Q: I think the press around you coming on the show was like, like it was just a revival for the show. A: Well actually, what they wanted to do was they wanted to kind of relaunch the show through a medical student’s eyes. So my first episode I was in every scene, which of course didn’t make some people in the cast very happy.

Okay, so what happened? The introduction of Lucy was clearly planned as part of the show's long-term development, knowing that their biggest star was leaving and that several other established characters would likely be departing within the next few years. But rather than becoming a long-term character Lucy was increasingly sidelined and abruptly killed off mid-way through season six.

In general if you ask people why Lucy was killed off they will tell you that Kellie asked to leave the show because she found it too difficult to be on a medical drama after the death of her sister Heather (who passed away from lupus just one week before she joined the show). This is not true.

This idea is likely based on quotes from Kellie where she opened up later about what a difficult time she was having in her life because of the death of her sister, but she has never once stated that she asked to leave the show. In fact in one of the quotes this idea is based on she outright states that she was fired (emphasis mine):

When [showrunner] John Wells approached me to have Lucy leave, I was a little relieved, just because I kind of couldn’t keep it up, and so it was a blessing in disguise, even though I took it as I was being fired. (Vox, September 6th 2017)

Effectively, Kellie was able to find the silver lining in being removed from the show and has said in recent years that she views it as being for the best, but she didn't ask to leave. In fact she emphatically told Worst Podcast Ever that she didn't ask to leave the show.

Q: Then, did you ask to leave the show? A: No, no. I did not ask to leave the show.

Worst Podcast Ever, November 2019

Kellie also stated in an interview just prior to the start of season six that she was contracted for six years, and that although they have an option not to renew she wants to remain with the show:

(TV Guide, August 1999)

I know this is a lot of context to provide before even really getting into what I want to talk about, but it’s important because these are kind of obfuscatory details that people tend to get hung up on litigating every time this topic comes up so I wanted to establish these points straight off, some of which will gain greater relevance later.

What I want to talk about is what happened behind the scenes on ER when Kellie joined the show, and my belief that she was failed by the producers of the show (specifically John Wells). This is the part that involves talking about Noah Wyle and his behaviour on the set of this show. So let’s hear from him:

Kellie came on that show and we were like rock stars, you know. We were like, “Who’s the new kid? Why is she getting a whole episode about her? We don’t do that, and that’s not the kind of thing we do.” Like, we were—I don’t want to say ‘pricks’ but we were cocky. We worked extremely hard to be the number one show over those five seasons and when Kellie came on it was like, “Earn your keep.”

(People TV, April 16th 2018)

Here is where I harbour a lot of guilt. I was not nice, all the time, to Kellie. And I feel bad because there were a lot of extenuating circumstances in Kellie’s life that I wasn’t aware of at the time.

(People TV, April 16th 2018)

So basically in his words, he was “not nice” to her and he had an attitude that she didn’t really belong on the show. In other words, he was bullying her.

There’s some other things about this that I want to highlight because this is one of two statements he has made that are what people are referring to when they tell you that he apologised for his behaviour towards her so while my goal isn’t to litigate him as a person too much I think it’s worth examining this as an ‘apology’.

The first thing I want to note is that he never once acknowledges Kellie’s talent or her accomplishments. He describes his attitude towards her being one basically of, “who is she?” as if she didn’t have a right to be on the show. This speaks to something that I won’t get into too much but Noah generally seems to have had a sense of personal ownership over ER almost as if he created it where he viewed the show’s success as a product of his hard work and anyone who came onto the show after season one was unfairly benefiting from their status as the number one drama without having contributed to getting it there.

Now, there is nothing wrong with taking ownership of your hard work and feeling proud of being part of a successful project—but, as I’ve mentioned, Kellie was already an established and Emmy-nominated actress when she came onto ER. In my view any sincere apology from him would involve an acknowledgement of her career prior to ER, and that she had in fact earned her place on the show (certainly in the eyes of the producers, who developed the role for her and did not require her to audition) rather than continuing to talk about her as if she had been an unknown quantity. It’s very easy to understand why she was given the responsibility of leading an episode within the full context of her career. I also find it difficult to believe that, at the time, he genuinely did not know who she was considering the press coverage around her joining the show. Regardless, I think expressing that he had that attitude without clarifying that he was wrong to feel that way does Kellie a disservice especially speaking twenty years on in a context where people may be less familiar with her early career than they were at the time of her casting.

The other part of this that I want to highlight is that he says he felt bad because there were “extenuating circumstances” in Kellie’s life, referring to the death of her sister Heather. The term “extenuating circumstances” is interesting because it implies he still believes Kellie’s work on the show was substandard, it’s just that she had an excuse. So at best I think you could say Noah is apologising for his behaviour towards her but not the underlying attitude that was driving it. Though the words “I’m sorry” do not appear here so I’m not sure that I would actually classify this as an apology, personally.

I’m also not fully convinced that he was fully unaware of her “extenuating circumstances” at the time, considering that she had to miss the NBC press day due to what was described at the time as a family emergency and the start of production was delayed by a week to accommodate her when her sister died.

A: And my sister got very sick with lupus and passed away a week before I started. Q: Before you started ER? A: They delayed a week for me.

(Worst Podcast Ever, November 16th 2019)

There is also a quote from Alex Kingston indicating that the cast were aware of a personal tragedy in Kellie’s life, at least by season six (emphasis mine).

znelens: You were so great in “All in the Family.” I was wondering if it was any more difficult or weird to film the trauma and death scenes with Kellie Martin as opposed to just another guest star. Alex Kingston: It was, actually. It was extremely difficult. Partly because it was difficult knowing the actress, herself, was going to be leaving the show. Whether the character was dying or not, it's hard when any actress leaves the show. We also knew that Kellie had suffered through some personal tragedy in her family. That made her character's dying also much more difficult for me, at least, to deal with. She was amazingly strong throughout the filming of that, and I was a total wreck. (WB Chat, October 12th 2000)

(In fact, Kellie by that point had written an article for Jane Magazine about her sister’s death, which was reported on in the New York Post in August 1999.)

So it’s very possible that he didn’t know the exact details of what had happened but just logistically he would have to have known that something serious had happened in her life, he just likely took the production delay as more undue special treatment to foster resentment over. It’s not hard to understand why he would not want to admit this part of things though, because confessing to having bullied your 22 year-old female costar in the context of the kinds of conversations that were happening in the industry in 2018 under #MeToo about systemic misogyny is daunting enough, much less admitting that you did it knowing that she was already struggling with a devastating recent tragedy in her life. Because it’s just sort of a cartoonishly awful thing to have to own up to.

But I will give Noah that he did follow up these sentiments by saying this in EW’s oral history of Lucy’s death which appears to be based on the same interviews as People’s coverage:

WYLE: I feel bad because there were a lot of extenuating circumstances in Kellie's life that I wasn't aware of at the time. MARTIN: My sister had passed away a week before I started ER. So, ER was all tangled up with a lot of bad time in my life. WYLE: She was amazing to come into that environment and hold her own. (Entertainment Weekly, March 30th 2018)

I also want to highlight the use of the pronoun ‘we’, as in, “We were like, ‘Who’s the new kid?’” I think it’s interesting that he uses this word because he is presenting what appear to have been his personal feelings as a collective attitude from the original cast. This just comes off to me as an attempt to diffuse personal responsibility for his behaviour because, while it may be the case that some others agreed with him, this attitude was by no means universal.

(Unfortunately I have never been able to find the interview mentioned here but this is from a contemporary forum post.)

ER moment: “The kiss on the cheek every morning from George Clooney [the ex-Dr. Doug Ross]. I miss that.” (USA Weekend, April 25th 1999)

MARTIN: I was 21 or 22. I remember taking it kind of personally that I was being stabbed and leaving the show. So, I don't think I would feel the same way now, being 42. If it were me now, I would have a lot more fun with it. I was definitely traumatized by Lucy's send-off. I know Alex [Kingston] was really sad, Anthony Edwards was really sad, and I would like to think that George Clooney would have been sad—had he been there. (Entertainment Weekly, March 30th 2018, emphasis mine)

A: The set was ‘interesting’ after George left. Q: Were people jockeying for position? A: I thought the set was much more balanced when George was there. I was happier when George was there, actually. He brought a beautiful kind of— because it was such a successful show I felt like George kind of brought everyone down to earth.

(Worst Podcast Ever, November 16th 2019)

(So again this is not about litigating the morality of individuals. I’m not trying to glaze George Clooney, I’m aware of his friendship with Brad Pitt and I also realise that he and Noah are also still friends and speak highly of each other so this is not an attempt to pit them against each other. The point is that in Kellie’s experience he did not share the attitude that Noah is attributing as a collective to the entire existing cast—it was more of a personal issue on Noah’s part than a ‘we’ situation.)

Here is Noah again on his attitude towards new cast members on ER:

But when [Goran Visnjic] came on to the show, I had a chip on my shoulder. I had a chip on my shoulder with anybody that came on that show. I’ve systematically gone to and apologized to everybody over the years about being the person that I was — which was, “You better come to play, you better bring your A game. This is pro ball, blah, blah, blah.” And it was not an easy environment to work in because we didn’t suffer fools. We were really hard on people, and I was hard on people that were coming into the show, like Erik Palladino or Michael Michele. Everybody had to earn their keep, in my opinion, especially poor Kellie Martin. I owe her a big apology. Goran, I [gave him grief] when he first came on. And then I realized that he was a way better actor than I was. He performed Hamlet in Dubrovnik in front of thousands of European screaming fans. He was the real deal. I hated him because I always felt like I was losing a scene to him. Alright. Let’s talk about something else. (The Hollywood Reporter, April 23rd 2019)

Something I want to note here immediately is that he did something for Goran that he has never done for Kellie: acknowledged his pre-ER accomplishments, and that he was professionally jealous of him.

And to be clear: I do believe that Noah was professionally jealous of Kellie. He admitted that he had a problem with her leading an episode as a newcomer, as she had yet to “earn [her] keep”, and he has acknowledged that he had a chip on his shoulder with new cast members. The fact that Kellie didn’t have to audition (like Noah had), that she was attending Yale and reportedly maintaining a 3.9 GPA there (Noah never attended college, although it was expected of him by his family), that she was already nominated for an Emmy as a teenager are all things that I think would have bothered him.

It’s also impossible for me to talk about this without mentioning the undercurrent of sexism in the way he discusses this especially when you contrast his statements about “poor Kellie Martin” (condescending language) with what he says about Goran Višnjić. My assessment of all this is that Noah resented Kellie because he felt that her achievements and her place on the show were unearned—this is a very common attitude for insecure men to have towards women whose achievements they feel threatened by—and that’s why the phrase “earn your keep” always comes up in connection to her specifically. I’m sure that in his mind she “lucked into” a lot of things that he felt he had had to work hard for and that was likely his motivation for bullying her.

Personally speaking, I find there to be a large element of self-justification and self-explanation in these statements rather than a sincere acknowledgement that he was in the wrong. That said, he does say here that he has apologised privately to everyone he feels he mistreated and singled her out as someone he owes an apology in particular. Great if he has, there’s obviously no way of interrogating this as it’s a personal matter between them that Kellie has never commented on directly. But this post is about the contemporary situation on the set rather than assessing his level of personal change or their relationship as it stands today.

Though I will say just because I have seen people claim that the two of them are friends now that there is no evidence of this. That doesn’t mean that she didn’t accept his apology, since forgiveness and amends don’t necessitate friendship, it’s just that there’s no indication that the two of them are even in regular contact. In fact when he left a comment on one of her instagram posts in 2020 she didn’t like or reply to it, they don’t follow each other over there, she wasn’t invited to the ER zoom reunion in 2021, and she has never posted a single thing about The Pitt to congratulate him on the show or his awards success, unlike someone like Erik Palladino who does appear to be friends with Noah despite also having been named by him as someone he was “hard on”.

Left: Kellie joking in April 2021 that the rest of the cast must have lost her number in response to the ER reunion announcement. Right: Noah’s comment on Kellie’s post five months prior, showing she didn’t respond (I had to include the caption of the post itself because it baffles me how unrelated his comment is).

So what was Kellie’s experience like on ER? She has never talked directly about whatever it was Noah specifically was doing to her and this gets into what I want to say about her being failed by the production as a whole and not just him because there seems to have been an overall lack of support considering her circumstances and the amount of responsibility placed on her shoulders coming onto the show, but this clip is worth listening to:

So, ER was a demanding show. They expected a lot of actors and Kellie appeared in every scene in her first episode so they asked a lot of her in particular. I suppose it might be tempting here to agree with Noah that maybe she just wasn’t up to the job but I think that’s a deeply unfair perspective considering her circumstances and the fact that she did actually meet their expectations: the first episode of season five exists, as written and intended, with her appearing in every scene. And they got all those technically challenging oners, they didn’t have to simplify the scenes to make it easier for her. Her having difficulty with a steep learning curve right at the beginning of a new job didn’t force a rewrite or reformulation, and she showed up and did something a lot of experienced actors would have struggled with under the best of circumstances a week after her sister’s death.

As for the scene she’s referring to, I want to post a clip from the first episode with two scenes back to back (which is also how they appear in the show). In the first she says the term ‘glomeruleronephritis’ and in the second she doesn’t but I suspect the second is actually the one she’s talking about:

So the reason why I suspect it’s the second scene and not the first is because nothing about the first scene lines up with her description aside from her use of the term ‘glomerulonephritis’. It’s a shot-reverse shot set-up with just one guest actor and although the term does occur in the middle of a monologue it’s also in the middle of the scene where things are switching back and forth rather than the end of a long take. The camera is also on the other actress when she says it, meaning that if she was really struggling they could have just picked it up in ADR rather than wasting expensive 35mm film (which the show was shot on) on multiple takes.

The second scene, on the other hand, features three other series regulars (Noah Wyle, Anthony Edwards, and Julianna Margulies) and two guest actors, opens with a oner that’s over a minute long, and requires her to rattle off a string of medical jargon right at the end of that oner. She also glances at something off-set right before delivering this line, as if she is receiving direction. So although the term ‘glomerulonephritis’ does not occur in this scene, it’s possible that it was in the script and the solution in the end was for Noah to cut across her with his line before she had to say it.

I also want to highlight a specific acting choice that Noah makes in this scene, since he discussed this in the same 2018 EW article where he is quoted saying he feels bad about his treatment of her:

Here is what Noah says about this (and it has to be about this scene as this is the only time he does this to Kellie on the show):

WYLE: I remember very early on her being so mad at me because I made this choice. I was talking to another doctor and she was here asking me a question. When I turned to her, I pretended like, "Oh, there you are," and I bent down like this and put my hands on my hips, it was like I was talking to a child. She just started fuming when they called cut. (Entertainment Weekly, March 30th 2018)

Interesting quote because he really mischaracterises the nature of the scene by talking about it as if it was a dialogue between Carter and another character and Lucy approaches for something, rather than what is actually happening on the show which is that Carter is already in the middle of berating Lucy and does this to put her firmly in her place.

Given what Kellie has said about her experience on this show especially making this episode (again one week after her sister had died), regardless of whether this was the specific scene she highlighted or not, it also seems less likely that she was ‘fuming’ in a comical way and more like she might have been on the verge of tears. But maybe we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he just misremembered the details. Either way I’m not a huge fan of him sharing this as a funny little anecdote in the same interview where he’s expressing allegedly sincere feelings of remorse about his behaviour. But those are just my feelings.

There’s one more thing that I want to highlight about “Carter’s” body language in this and another scene where she has to rattle off a list of medical jargon in the middle of a oner that’s over a minute long, and a specific pose he adopts right as she has to do this (and in both cases impatiently cuts her off towards the end of her line):

I want to compare this with something Maura Tierney said about her experience of coming onto the show in season six:

(Entertainment Weekly, December 7th 2019)

I guess what I am suggesting here is that this may have been less of a character-driven acting choice on Noah’s part and more a way of letting Kellie know that he was frustrated and impatient with her struggling with something she has said she had difficulty with (which is the medical jargon she was required to deliver huge chunks of in her first episode). That is, although neither Noah nor Kellie have given any specifics I think it’s possible to infer some things about the on-set dynamic from some of the acting choices he makes and the extreme level of hostility from Carter towards Lucy in a handful of these scenes.

There is one other scene that I think is kind of interesting, this is from the season five finale 5.22 “Getting to Know You”:

For those who don’t know, for a network television show like ER the scripts for the full season are typically not all written in advance. The season is written as it’s in production and as it’s airing. That means that by the time the season finale was written the producers had ample time to observe the on-set dynamic between Noah and Kellie, which makes it very interesting to me that they had Lucy confront Carter in this way about his attitude towards her. Not just the fact that she outright states “you haven’t liked me from the get-go, I’ve never been quite up to your standards” but that they even had Lucy trip over her words as she’s speaking—which as established is something that happened to Kellie with the medical jargon in her first episode.

Something worth noting: 5.22 was written by Lydia Woodward, who also wrote Lucy’s introductory episode which Noah was apparently complaining about to anyone who would listen (including Kellie herself if that “which didn’t make some people on the cast very happy” comment is anything to go by), and “Be Still My Heart”, the episode in which Carter and Lucy get stabbed—which is a product of Carter’s dismissive attitude towards Lucy and his failures where she is concerned. Lydia Woodward was also the producer quoted praising Kellie in her casting announcements, and she defended Kellie in an Entertainment Weekly article which called Lucy “annoying”.

“Becca was annoying because she knew everything,” Martin says. “Maybe I'm annoying and that's what it boils down to.” Really? “I wouldn't agree with that,” protests ER producer Lydia Woodward. “Kellie couldn't be further from being a prima donna. She plays a bright person who isn't quite capable yet.” (Entertainment Weekly, May 14th 1999)

Just thought that was interesting, as is the fact that Woodward also departed ER at the end of season six (although she returned as a consulting producer in seasons eleven and twelve).

Now I’m at the point where I have to talk about Carter and Lucy as a romantic relationship and Noah’s professed objections and I’m realising that the idea of this actually really exhausts me. It’s a combination of finding Noah himself incredibly disingenuous and also really disliking how often I see people giving him credit for “taking a stand” on a supposed moral issue that makes this a deeply frustrating topic for me.

I get kind of heated when I talk about this, which is unfortunate, but I mostly want to cover this aspect of things because I really want people to think about what they are saying when they say that Noah was right to shut down the relationship and giving him credit for his moral backbone or whatever. It’s not about litigating him so much as I just want people to stop taking kind of gross sentiments and talking about them as if they reflect a laudible worldview that we should all share.

I suppose the best approach is just to start with what he has said about this.

USA Today, May 23rd 1999

TV Guide, June 1999

But when Wyle found out Carter and Lucy were supposed to do a lot more than kiss, he went to the source to shut it down. “I thought of her as sort of a little sister, which is why when they wrote this episode for us to suddenly start making out in this room, I had such a huge problem with it,” he says. “The script originally had us having sex in one of the exam rooms, and somebody walking in on us. I had a big problem with it. In fact, in the 15 years I was on that show, the 260-some-odd episodes I did, I only wrote [executive producer] John Wells one letter asking him to change something that he had written, and it was about that episode.” “I just thought Carter wouldn’t do it, he wouldn’t do it at work, and he wouldn’t do it with this student, and he wouldn’t do it with her,” Wyle says. “He wouldn’t do it, he wouldn’t do it, he wouldn't do it. So I made this huge passionate plea to John about how the character's ethical center is his core defining characteristic, and once you infringe upon that or you chip away at it, it’s very difficult to get that back. I went through this whole thing and he was so amused by my letter that he proposed a compromise of this kiss.” Wyle is quick to point out, however, that his opposition to the couple had nothing to do with Martin. “Not that Kellie is not a very attractive woman,” he says. “She is, she’s adorable, and anybody in their right mind would find her so. However, I felt that John Carter, in that moment, he liked a different type of woman. She’s a good kisser. I’ll give her that. It wasn’t unpleasant to shoot, but I kind of wished we hadn’t.” (Entertainment Weekly, April 2nd 2018)

There is so much to say about each of these quotes but let me just preface this by saying that I do not believe him that his primary issue was to do with Carter’s sexual ethics. Carter almost routinely sleeps with patients, something which was highlighted by the show as an ethical boundary in Mark’s case—in fact, his girlfriend in season five was someone he met as a patient. In season six he treats his cousin’s ex-wife and then starts dating her, and uses his status as her trauma doctor to find out privileged medical information about her that she does not want him to know. In a later season he dates a nineteen year-old. This idea that it’s an unforgivable ethical line for the character to cross is just absurd.

It’s also ridiculous just in Lucy’s case, even ignoring Carter’s overall sexual behaviour. Carter is completely inappropriate with Lucy. He collaborates with Jerry to make fun of her for what he perceives as her sexual naivety in her second episode. He interrogates her boyfriend about whether or not they’re having sex. He openly stares at her ass. The idea that all of this is fine as long as they don’t have consensual sex is actually really gross. When it comes to a television show, an audience is typically okay with stuff like this within the context of something we recognise as a romantic arc. All of Carter’s obsessive and inappropriate behaviour with Lucy is acceptable because we understand that the show is establishing a mutual attraction between the characters that will culminate in a relationship. But in real life this would be considered sexual harassment.

So before even touching on the behind-the-scenes dynamic at play, it’s actually incredibly galling to see people treat this as a reasonable or even commendable position. It’s not. It’s disgusting. If you bring real-world sexual ethics into this and only object at the point where the flirting is reciprocated then you’re basically saying that in your mind it’s fine for a superior to harass his subordinate, as long as she’s not interested.

Or you can engage this as a story engaging in certain familiar tropes where the idea is that the dynamic is compelling because on paper one of these characters is in a superior power position to the other but in actuality there is a certain amount of equal footing between them. The audience is not parsing this as unethical or wrong, they’re parsing it as a romantic comedy, which was the clear intention of the writing. In fact, the show goes out of its way to let you know that this is ‘okay’, in fact it “happens all the time.” It’s not treated as a serious issue, it’s treated as a comedic subplot in an otherwise heavy dramatic episode.

Point by point I want to address a few other things:

“To try and manufacture that Lucy is the hospital vixen is wrong, because that’s not what Lucy represents.” I have no idea what he believes Lucy is supposed to represent, but this is a profoundly sexist thing to say. Basically slut-shaming her for having sex with, at most, two men (because it’s never actually established whether or not she and Dale had sex).

Noah wanting Carter to date Weaver: extremely telling of how little he really considers things from the female characters’ perspectives, because not only is he fine with Laura Innes’ character being besmirched in a way he supposedly considers unacceptable for his own, Weaver is probably the only character on the show who would never sleep with a subordinate.

Noah’s thoughts on Kellie’s attractiveness: as far as I can tell the only person who has ever suggested that his issue with this relationship was that he felt Kellie was unattractive is Noah himself, so I’m not sure why he felt the need to ‘clarify’ that. In fact it’s actually really unprofessional and kind of gross that he even brought that up since your personal level of attraction to your scene partner should be irrelevant regardless of the type of scene you’re performing. The fact that he was rambling about this in, I’m assuming based on the dates, the same base interview where he was talking about “feeling bad” for his treatment of Kellie is mystifying to me.

Something else that I find incredibly gross about that 2018 quote from Noah is his statement, “She’s a good kisser.” I find this gross because again it’s irrelevant and somewhat objectifying information about someone he has effectively admitted to bullying, and also because he’s lying, because he didn’t kiss her. And I know he didn’t kiss her because this is one case where Kellie did go on the record about something Noah did to her on set:

Maxim, February 2000

So when it comes to this, it’s interesting to me that despite this hinging on Noah’s supposed concern over the optic of a fictional power dynamic a lot of people seem totally resistant to engaging the real-life power dynamic between him and Kellie, who was younger, less famous, and less senior on the show, in addition to being a woman. If she had had an objection to an intimate scene with him she would not have had the status on the show to refuse to do it, in fact if she had she likely would have chosen not to be in the position Noah placed her in—but John Wells has no qualms about making actresses do nude scenes they’re uncomfortable with not because of concerns about the storytelling (which was Noah’s stated issue) but because of their vulnerability.

Here is Emmy Rossum talking about her experience filming a scene for Shameless. The showrunner she mentions here is John Wells, who was the showrunner for ER in season five and wrote and directed the episode Kellie is referring to in her Maxim quote (5.14 “The Storm Part 1”).

I did a scene this year in the prison where I was being strip searched, it was a cavity search scene. I was completely naked for it. And the way they were shooting it I didn’t even have my vanity patch on, which I usually have my little triangle in the front over here [gesturing towards her crotch]. And I had a huge panic attack as we were shooting it, which is actually, ended up in the show. Because I had never felt so dehumanised in a weird way. And I said to my boss, our showrunner [John Wells] “I really hope that scene is good, I really hope it’s worth it because you’re putting me through hell, like I had a huge panic attack,” and he was like, “Yeah, it’s good, don’t worry.”

HuffPost Live, March 14th 2014

So presumably if Kellie had voiced an objection to being made to perform a kissing scene with someone who was seemingly going out of his way to make it degrading and uncomfortable for her she would have been overruled.

And I want people to sit and think about what filming this scene would have entailed and that Noah was doing this in front of a camera crew (in all likelihood majority or entirely male, just statistically) and the director who in this case also happened to be the showrunner John Wells, and try to empathise with what an embarrassing and potentially upsetting situation this actually is to put a young actress in. I want people to actually sit in the irony of doing this to a 22 year-old real woman in the name of avoiding an allegedly ‘problematic’ fictional optic and then maybe people will stop saying “Noah was right” re: his argument about the ship. Like if people actually care about power dynamics as much as they claim to, maybe consider the real-life power dynamics at play on the set of that show.

This is without even getting into the fact that it did not substantially change the actual content of the episode. Just because the audience doesn’t see it doesn’t change the fact that Carter was about to fuck Lucy on the floor of that radiology lab and the rest of the episode plays out as if he actually had. So even if you believe Noah was “right” to shut down Carter and Lucy as a romantic relationship, he didn’t actually do that. All he achieved was making Kellie’s job more difficult and making Carter actually look worse than if they had had a relationship.

But I wanted to talk about this scene in particular to highlight Wells’ and the producers’ role in enabling Noah to create a toxic work environment for Kellie because at the end of the day it’s the showrunner’s responsibility to protect and support their actors. In a healthy working environment, someone would have intervened or attempted to mediate between Noah and Kellie, or a solution would have been found that didn’t involve writing Kellie off the show. Because while I don’t believe that Noah personally asked for Kellie to be removed or even intended for that to happen, I do think that was a consequence of his behaviour.

It’s clear that Lucy was intended from the start as a romantic interest for Carter, since she replaced his previous love interest in the roster and it was hinted at when she was brought onto the show—also anyone who has watched enough television could easily recognise the opening beats of a romantic arc between the two characters from the first handful of episodes. But just because Noah made it impossible for the writers to pursue that shouldn’t have meant that Kellie had to leave the show, had the writers been interested in developing alternative storylines for Lucy as a character. And it’s important that—while she considers it for the best now—Kellie did not ask to leave because it shows that it was plainly an issue of sexist storytelling priorities, and Kellie essentially being the one to face the consequences for Noah being difficult.

To be honest, I wanted to get into some other stuff about the way they wrote Lucy out and Kellie’s feelings about the character’s death but honestly this post is so long that I think it’s probably best to leave it here for now and maybe circle back to that at a later date but suffice it to say I think the way they chose to write her out was incredibly insensitive, bordering on cruel—which again speaks to my feeling that Kellie was failed overall by the producers of the show.

There is one last thing I want to say to bring things full circle a little bit. I said at the top of this post that I dislike the framing this discussion often takes on and that I didn’t write this with the aim of ‘cancelling’ Noah Wyle even though I’m sure it’s clear that I personally don’t like him or John Wells very much. That’s because I dislike the fact that the entry point for these kinds of discussions is always litigating the moral character of some famous man, and I don’t think that’s a useful way of approaching things.

I think especially in a case like this when questions like “is he a good person” and “is it okay for me to like him/his creative output” are overemphasised the focus then becomes litigating details like exactly how much a certain individual is to blame, what exonerative factors there might be, how much to commend him for owning up, and the actual experience of the people who were negatively impacted becomes an afterthought. I also think it just puts people on the defensive if you make them feel like they’re expected to renounce someone they admire, which makes it more difficult for them to engage your perspective. Also, I’m inclined to take a systemic view of situations like this and I think it’s rarely the case that just one person is solely to blame.

So, I really don’t expect everyone to share my feelings about Noah personally. I have no issue with people liking and respecting him. But I do have a faint hope that maybe people could be a little more thoughtful in how they discuss this, and take more care not to repeat false details, and maybe approach it a little more from the perspective of empathising with Kellie’s experience.

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