T.K. Carter has died. A stand-up comic and actor, Carter had a decades-spanning career that ran the gamut from the worlds of comedy—with appearances in TV shows like Punky Brewster and FXX’s Dave, and films like 1990s farce Ski Patrol—to far more serious fare. (Notably, the starring role in David Simon’s harrowing 2003 miniseries The Corner.) Per TMZ, Carter’s body was discovered in his California home on Friday, January 9. He was 69.
Raised in Los Angeles, Carter pursued stand-up from an early age, appearing at The Comedy Store and the Improv when he was still just a teenager, becoming a (very young) contemporary of folks like Paul Mooney and Richard Pryor. Simultaneously pursuing both comedy and acting, he picked up early roles in TV starting in the late ’70s, including brief stints on Good Times and The Jeffersons, before breaking into film. (A notable early role saw him play his part in one of the great tension-building scenes of horror movie history, playing roller-skating chef Nauls in John Carpenter’s The Thing.)
Carter spent the ’80s and ’90s mostly known as a comic actor, including season-long stints on kid-focused sitcoms Good Morning, Miss Bliss and Punky Brewster. (Carter was actually intended to star in a spin-off of the latter series, Fenster Hall, but after the series failed to get a green light, he was brought on to the cast of the original show as a teacher for Soleil Moon Frye’s plucky foster kid.) After co-starring in 1990’s Ski Patrol, and branching out into voice acting, Carter worked regularly throughout the era, racking up numerous guest spot credits on shows like Family Matters, The Nanny, The Steve Harvey Show, Moesha, and several others.
Carter scored the biggest dramatic success of his career, though, in 2003, when—after a long audition process in which he aggressively campaigned for the role—he secured the part of gentle drug addict Gary McCullough in The Corner. (Then-HBO CEO Chris Albrecht, who’d known Carter from their shared days together in the comedy world, was apparently instrumental in getting producers to consider him over the many more famous actors circling the part.) Spending months preparing for the job, Carter produced a critically acclaimed, heartbreaking portrayal of a good man incapable of escaping his addictions; The Corner turns, in large part, on the tragedy of Gary McCullough, and Carter ably portrayed a character whose intelligence and kindness are readily apparent even as they drown in shame and compulsion.
Carter continued to work regularly for the rest of his life, appearing in numerous TV roles in the 2010s and 2020s. His final parts saw him once again split the worlds of comedy and drama, appearing in small roles in Dave Burd’s raucous comedy series Dave and ABC’s con-man drama The Company You Keep.
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