Chicago Med season 5 character review: Daniel Charles

What Chicago Med season 5 means for Daniel Charles

This has been said on this site before, but Oliver Platt is a national treasure. He’s an incredible actor, and he should in no way be held responsible for how much his character has changed in the last few seasons.

Charles has felt somewhat rudderless since Chicago Med wrote out his mentee Dr. Sarah Reese (Rachel DiPillo) a few seasons back. That decision had a huge impact on his character. No other character has been able to be a foil for him like she was, and that goes the other way as well; he doesn’t feel like he has a real rapport with anybody. Instead, he bounces between characters in each episode, not creating a substantive bond anywhere.

And that also means he doesn’t have cases that necessarily feel like his; it feels like he just pops up to help on or take over somebody else’s story. When Chicago Med had two psychiatrists, then it had to put a certain amount of focus on that department, instead of merging it with the ED stories of the week.

On top of Charles seeming like a man without a mission, what happened in his personal life was so heartbreaking and disappointing. To get audiences invested in Charles winning back Caroline (that happened very quickly anyway), only to kill her off, felt like the writers making a plot choice for the drama. Or did Paula Newsome want or need off the series? And the subsequent storyline with his daughter hasn’t been any different than any other TV teenager plot on any other show.

Oliver Platt could make reading the vending machine contents interesting, but the show needs to take a look at how it’s using him, because it could get so much more out of his character.