The original post: /r/television by /u/CableBoyJerry on 2024-07-05 02:55:20.

I’m binge-watching ER and I cannot decide which character is more detestable: Dr. Kerry Weaver or Dr. Robert Romano.

I am leaning toward declaring Weaver to be a more horrible, two-faced person because she has, on more than one occasion, screwed over other characters just to save her own skin, but she presents herself outwardly as a good person.

  1. Weaver offered to be a mentor to Lucy Knight, a young medical student, and then immediately dropped her when she got promoted and no longer wanted to waste her time on her.
  2. Weaver leaves the hospital to meet a private investigator at a nearby restaurant who has found her mother (who has put her up for adoption when Weaver was a baby). Meanwhile, Dr. Jing-Mei Chen and Dr. David Malucci are struggling to treat a patient. They try paging Weaver multiple times but she doesn’t hear it because she has left her pager in the restroom.

The patient ends up dying because Dr. Chen and Dr. Malucci make a critical error. Weaver ends up firing Malucci because she doesn’t like that he doesn’t respect her authority enough (i.e., he doesn’t kiss her ass) and she throws Dr. Chen under the bus when there is an investigation into the case of the previously mentioned patient.

Weaver deserved to get into trouble because she had left the hospital and neglected to respond to the pages, but since Dr. Chen had made an error while treating patient as a medical student 6 years earlier, Weaver and Dr. Romano used it as an excuse to push the blame entirely on her. Dr. Chen ended up working instead of accepting the punishment (demotion and 1-year suspension).

  1. Weaver entered into a sexual relationship with a hospital psychiatrist named Dr. Kim Legaspi, but Weaver insisted on keeping her relationship private and didn’t want anyone to know she was a lesbian.

In one episode, Dr. Legaspi interviewed a suicidal young woman who was struggling with her sexuality (and who had caused a massive train wreck after parking her car on the train tracks in a failed suicide attempt), and Dr. Legaspi decides to console the patient by admitting that she is a lesbian.

Well, this suicidal young woman falsely accused Dr. Legaspi of touching her, and rather than support her fully, Weaver gave her only half-hearted support and was more concerned about her sexual orientation being revealed to the hospital administrators. Eventually, Legaspi was pushed out and Weaver tried to help her, but it was too late. Legaspi quit because she didn’t want to work at a homophobic hospital.

There are other insidious things that Weaver did, such as being in general a power-hungry hardass who berated her staff.

At least with Dr. Romano, the audience knew he was an asshole and he made no effort to conceal. He was always open about being a douchebag and sometimes showed his softer side.

He did betray Dr. Peter Benton and Dr. Elizabeth Corday more than once, but they knew from the get-go that he would do that.

So, which television characters do you think are the biggest two-faces/snakes?