I Know That Smile!

We watched High Potential last night. It's fast becoming a favorite TV show. I'm hoping they continue with what they're doing and the character development. Too many shows  take a wrong turn, as far as we are concerned, and lose us. We no longer care about the characters. But this one is doing well, so far. She's crazy-smart, cares about her kids, and gains the respect of the cops around her, especially those who wanted to dis her for how she dresses.

There's a long standing mystery behind the weekly crime solving, in case you haven't watched it yet. Our main character's husband and father of her oldest disappeared one night on an errand to go buy diapers. That baby is now a teenager who has believed for years that her father never cared about her. But we are getting clues that something else happened to cause his disappearance, that it wasn't voluntary, and he may even be alive.

Enter a new character, a middle aged black man with a landscaping business who may have some knowledge of what's going on. Last night there was a scene in a restaurant booth where we got close ups of his face while he was in conversation. He'd never looked at all familiar to me until that moment. I knew that smile! I've seen it before. The face is older, heavier, and otherwise unrecognizable. But that smile haunted me all night. Who was he? Where did I know him from?

Sometimes when you start a search with minimal information, you ask Google some really stupid questions. OK, the program name and.... Well, I erased our recording once we finished watching it. So what else do I fill in to identify the character I wanted? Do I ask who's in the restaurant? Who knows what happened to the dad? How about his most significant contribution in the episode: who brought the backpack? Because that has some kind of important clue inside that we'll find out about next week. 

Maybe.

So I googled that and got a name of the actor. OK, not helpful, I don't recognize it, nor the plethora of small headshots  that accompanied it. Apparently he's been in a whole host of movies... that I've never seen, and many I've never heard of. There's a musical background, equally useless for me. I don't pay attention to the latest hits. Let's check further.... OK, TV stuff. 

Wait, there's a young face, along with the smile that I recognized. He was a doctor on ER! Got it! I watched that show without fail for the years it was on, recognized an actress who became Dr. Who's wife later on that show once I started following that for a few years, and when I had the opportunity to follow ER again in reruns on another network, watched those again. 

I knew it! With all the other facial changes, that smile stayed the same! Mekhi Phifer, now a character named Arthur, used to be Dr. Pratt on ER. 

OK, now I can get some sleep.