Development
The name of the character was inspired by The Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now part of the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts) which was a teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School, where series originator Michael Crichton studied medicine.
Several relationships were scripted into the character's narrative. In Season 4 he began dating Dr. Elizabeth Corday, played by Alex Kingston. Both surgeons, the characters competed with each other professionally and failed to be adequately supportive of each other in their personal crises, so Corday ends the relationship in Season 5. According to an article published in Jet in 1999, Eriq La Salle was the reason why the romance dissolved. He was unhappy that Benton's interracial romance with Corday was being shown as less problematic than his prior romances with black characters, such as Jeanie Boulet (played by Gloria Reuben) and Carla Reese (played by Lisa Nicole Carson). Mindful of the image that he was portraying on television, La Salle asked producers to end Benton's interracial romance. While being interviewed by Johnnie Cochran on Johnnie Cochran Tonight, La Salle commented, "We have to take care of the message that we're sending as African-Americans or any other group of minorities, that we have the exact same type of exchanges with our mates that we get to see our White counterparts have." In a subsequent episode, Benton was shown being compassionate to his former girlfriend, Jeanie.
Read more about this topic: Peter Benton
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observable fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question—the “philosophic temper,” in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascertained knowledge.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)