‘The Pitt’ Attempts to Kill ‘Baseless’ Lawsuit That Claims Show Ripped Off ‘ER’

The lawyers representing The Pitt are attempting to squash a lawsuit that claims the HBO Max medical drama is a knockoff of ER.

According to Variety, ER creator Michael Crichton’s estate brought the lawsuit against the show and Warner Bros. Discovery in 2024, claiming The Pitt is a “derivative work of ER.” In a final briefing submitted on Monday (May 11), Team Pitt’s lawyers described the lawsuit as “baseless.”

“Plaintiff seeks to kill The Pitt — and claims it should never have aired — based on a plainly incorrect misreading of a single phrase in a 1994 contract that gave Crichton approval rights over ‘derivative works’ of ER,” the briefing read, per Variety.

The defendants, who include producer John Wells and actor Noah Wyle, have said there is a lack of sufficient evidence. “The Pitt contains no protected elements from ER: aside from sharing a genre (hospital drama) and certain unprotectable, genre-specific tropes, like the use of medical jargon, the two shows are nothing alike,” the briefing stated.

It added, “Wyle certainly does not play the same character.”

The Pitt was created by former ER producer R. Scott Gemmill and is executive produced by Wells and Wyle. It premiered on January 9, 2025, and stars Wyle as Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, a senior attending physician at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. Wyler previously played John Carter on NBC’s ER.

In the reply briefing, the defendants noted that the Crichton estate filed the lawsuit before The Pitt even debuted and had “at one point considered, but ultimately abandoned, the idea of making an ER reboot that shared certain ideas with The Pitt — such as real-time pacing — that never appeared in ER itself.”

More from this section

Movies and TV shows casting across the US

Related

'The Pitt's Noah Wyle Reacts to Supriya Ganesh's Shocking Exit

The Crichton estate lawsuit accuses the producers of breach of contract, claiming The Pitt was only created after a deal to reboot ER fell through.

A trial judge previously denied a motion from the defendants to have the lawsuit thrown out under California’s anti-SLAPP statute, which protects against “an abuse of the legal process, where the primary objective is to harass, intimidate and financially and psychologically exhaust one’s opponent via improper means.”

The defendants have appealed the trial court’s order, arguing that the court did not apply the correct standard. The case is currently awaiting oral argument before the appellate court.

More Headlines:

• Donald Gibb Dies: ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ Star Was 71
• ‘Morning Joe’ Hosts Blast Trump Over His Shocking Comment About Rising Prices
• Why HGTV’s Alison Victoria Once Thought She Was on a Date With Jonathan Knight
• ‘The Pitt’ Attempts to Kill ‘Baseless’ Lawsuit That Claims Show Ripped Off ‘ER’
• CNN’s Erin Burnett Has Theory About Trump & His Frenzied Posting on Social Media