The Pitt star Noah Wyle has, for the first time, publicly addressed the lawsuit accusing the series of being an unauthorized reboot of the seminal hospital drama ER.
Wyle, 53, and Warner Bros. TV are being sued — alongside executive producer John Wells and showrunner R. Scott Gemill, both of whom also worked on ER — by the estate of ER creator Michael Creaton.
The lawsuit alleges that Wells and Wyle, who played Dr. John Carter in ER, dreamed up The Pitt after the Crichton estate blocked plans to bring back the original show. Warner Bros. TV has denied the allegations, calling them “false” and “meritless.”
Asked about the lawsuit in a new interview with Variety, Wyle said: “The only thing that I can legally speak to is how I feel emotionally, which is just profoundly sad and disappointed.
“This taints the legacy, and it shouldn’t have,” he admitted. “At one point, this could have been a partnership. And when it wasn’t a partnership, it didn’t need to turn acrimonious. But on the 30th anniversary of ER, I’ve never felt less celebratory of that achievement than I do this year.”
Wyle insisted that once the ER reboot didn’t come to fruition, “we pivoted as far in the opposite direction as we could in order to tell the story we wanted to tell and not for litigious reasons, but because we didn’t want to retread our own creative work.”
ER, which ran for 15 seasons from 1994 to 2009, focused on the professional and personal lives of a group of Chicago doctors. Besides Wyle, it also starred George Clooney, Anthony Edwards, Julianna Margulies, and Laura Innes.
Meanwhile, The Pitt, which has become an instant success for Max after its January debut, follows the 15-hour shift of Wyle’s Dr. Robby and his fellow ER workers at an underfunded Pittsburgh hospital. Each episode spans an hour of the shift.
“We really wanted to find something new for ourselves,” Wyle told Variety. “And in some ways, that’s what was so disheartening about the whole thing. We really felt like we’d done it.”
Filed last August, the lawsuit alleges: “The Pitt is ER. It’s not like ER. It’s not kind of ER. It’s not sort of ER. It is ER with the exact same executive producer, writer, star, production companies, studio and network as the planned ER reboot.”
Despite the Crichton estate’s efforts to get a judge to issue an injunction on The Pitt, which would halt production, the series was renewed for a second season in early February.
However, a week later, a judge denied Warner Bros. TV’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, saying the “Plaintiffs meet the minimal merit standard to demonstrate at least a prima facie case that The Pitt is derived from ER.”
