There used to be a rule you could follow on ER, back in the good old days (accent on the good).

If someone was on the table having a nice thrash about — doctors swarming over them like tourists in Times Square — you'd know whether the character was going to live or die based on one key plot point: if the sexy ER docs whipped out the defibrillator paddles. If the paddles came out, the character was going to live. If not, then... well, we don't think Grampa's gonna make it...

Yup, it's fair to say we miss ER: Original Recipe. By the end it was the prime example of a series outlasting its interest. But in 1994, man, that show was cool. Now, back in those days there were really only five main characters, Dr. Benton, Dr. Green (Jew, per the James Wilson principle which states that any show containing five or more main characters must contain one Hebrew or collapse upon itself), Dr. Ross, Nurse Hathaway, Dr. Lewis, and, the most goyishe character on television: Dr. Jon Carter.

Well, it probably won't take a pair of defibrillator paddles to shock you into figuring out where this is going. Carter — so WASPy, so old money, so white bread — was played by Noah Wyle who is so surprisingly Jewish. You'd be forgiven for missing it — Wyle has yet to play a character that is even mildly Jew-esque: it's like he got his graduate degree from the Seth Green school for Jews Who Play Goyim.

And yet, there it is, predictable as one of those classic ER episodes.

Clear!