The Pitt is similar enough to ER to allow Michael Crichton’s widow to pursue a long-running lawsuit over the award-winning medical drama, a US appeals court has ruled.
In a unanimous opinion filed on Wednesday, a three-judge panel denied an appeal from Warner Bros Television (WBTV), which has argued for two years that the shows are unrelated.
“There are clear and numerous similarities between The Pitt and ER,” the court ruled, citing the fact that both shows are set in an emergency room, and feature “frequently incomprehensible” medical jargon, overlapping crises and graphic depictions of injuries. “The doctors and nurses are exhausted; there are emotional outbursts,” the ruling reads. “Each includes a young doctor, fresh from medical school and incompetent.”
The defendants – WBTV, along with John Wells, executive producer of The Pitt and formerly an ER showrunner; his company John Wells Productions; actor Noah Wyle, who starred in both ER and The Pitt; and R Scott Gemmill, who was executive producer and writer on a number of ER episodes and is now the showrunner and an executive producer of The Pitt – had argued these elements were “generic similarities” common to “any dramatic story involving emergency room doctors” and that it “cannot be that all shows set in an emergency room are derivative of ER”.
But on Wednesday the court ruled: “We find the details here suffice for a prima facie case.”
The suit will now go to a jury trial in Los Angeles, unless the parties reach a settlement.
The author and screenwriter Crichton was the creator of ER, which was based on a film script he wrote about his experiences as a medical student. His ۱۹۹۴ contract for ER with WBTV included a “frozen rights” provision, which blocked any spin-offs or reboots of his work being made without his approval. Crichton died in ۲۰۰۸.
His widow, Sherri Crichton, filed her suit in August ۲۰۲۴, five months before the first episode of The Pitt debuted. She alleged that The Pitt was an unauthorised ER reboot, and accused Wells of “personal betrayal”.
The appeals court ruled on Wednesday that WBTV must go to trial, but dismissed Wyle, Wells and Gemmill as defendants, finding no evidence that any of them were aware they could violate Crichton’s contractual rights by creating The Pitt.
Wyle, Wells and Gemmill have all acknowledged in interviews that The Pitt was created because the ER reboot failed to get off the ground, but only because they had already come together to make a medical drama about the experiences of health workers during the pandemic.
“We were going to start down an ER reboot road that didn’t come to pass,” Wyle said on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, adding that because they’d assembled to plan that show with HBO Max “we were then allowed to really fast-track the development process [of The Pitt] because of that vacuum that we created from the near-miss”.
Wyle described not having to do the ER reboot as freeing, saying: “Once we uncoupled ourselves from that IP, it suddenly liberated the storytelling. It wasn’t about ‘who do we see again’ and ‘what have they been up to’. It’s ‘what are the issues of the day’ and ‘what’s the most cogent way to put them across’ … [it] allowed us to reframe and kind of modernise it, and not have to pay any homage to travelled road.”
WBTV had filed a motion to throw out Sherri Crichton’s lawsuit under California’s anti-Slapp statute, which is intended to stop meritless lawsuits that curtail freedom of speech. But the judge, Wendy Chang, denied that motion in ۲۰۲۵, finding that Sherri Crichton had enough evidence to proceed.
“I am deeply gratified by the Court of Appeal decision and look forward to discovery and to our case, which affects writers, creators and their families and estates, being presented to a jury,” Sherri Crichton told Variety on Wednesday.
The Guardian has contacted WBTV for comment.
The Pitt has won ۱۲ Emmys, two Golden Globes and a Peabody over two seasons, with Wyle winning multiple best actor awards for his performance as Dr Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, a grizzled chief attending doctor working in a Pittsburgh emergency department. On ۱۱ seasons of ER, Wyle played Dr John Carter, a rich young doctor working in an under-resourced emergency department in Chicago.
Season three of The Pitt will start broadcasting in January.
