Fell down the ER tag and was reminded that Mark Greene was supposed to be Jewish. And yet you can’t feel it at all in the character, which I think is what happens when you have neither a Jewish writer nor actor craft a Jewish character. The show had Julianna Margulies and Noah Wyle in their main cast and chose to make neither of their characters Jewish.
I’ve joked about how the Pitt basically asked their actors about their backgrounds and crafted characters around that, but it’s such a better move. Because the representation is so much better in the Pitt. All the subtle stuff is there in ways it just isn’t when you have a writer and an actor try to write a character with a background they have no connection to. So asking actors to bring their own cultures and ethnicities to the table does allow for so much of the subtle often non-verbal cultural specificities that you get in the Pitt.
