Noah Wyle Is Really Bummed about Michael Crichton's Widow Suing Him Over 'The Pitt'

We joked before the release of Max’s The Pitt that it really wasn’t a sequel to E.R. (*wink wink*), despite sharing the same executive producer, writer, and star (John Wells, R. Scott Gemmell, and Noah Wyle). But having spent 14 episodes with the series now (the season finale airs tonight), we retract our *wink wink*. It is not a sequel to E.R. any more than Pulse or Berlin ER are.

It’s a hospital drama, and it shares in common with E.R. what every other hospital drama shares: a hospital setting, doctors, nurses, and patients. And yes, the idea may have originally grown out of a desire to make an E.R. sequel (thank God they didn’t), but I daresay that The Pitt is better.

Still, Sherri Crichton — the widow of E.R. co-creator Michael Crichton — is suing Noah Wyle, John Wells, and Scott Gemmell, arguing that The Pitt rips off her late husband’s IP. “The Pitt is ER,” the complaint reads. “It’s not like ER, it’s not kind of ER, it’s not sort of ER. It is ER, complete with the same executive producer, writer, star, production companies, studio, and network as the planned ER reboot. No one has been fooled.”

Did you know that MobLand, the new Paramount+ series, was originally conceived as a spin-off of Ray Donovan? That Die Hard was originally conceived as a sequel to Frank Sinatra’s 1968 film, The Detective? Or that Speed was originally written as Die Hard 3? Ideas are reworked and turned into new things all the time.

That’s what happened here, and Wyle — for his part — is bummed about the lawsuit Sherri Crichton has filed.

“The only thing that I can legally speak to is how I feel emotionally, which is just profoundly sad and disappointed,” he told Variety. “This taints the legacy, and it shouldn’t have. 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.”

That is too bad, because there’s a lot to celebrate about E.R., too. But Wyle insists the two shows are not the same. “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.”

And the real-time structure and Dr. Robby’s obvious differences from Wyle’s previous Dr. Carter certainly do make The Pitt distinctive. “We really wanted to find something new for ourselves,” Wyle continued. “And in some ways, that’s what was so disheartening about the whole thing. We really felt like we’d done it.”

I agree. And in that same interview, as if we couldn’t love Noah Wyle any more, Variety also reports that cell phones were banned from set, but that someone (ahem, Wyle) started a lending library on set and loaned out a bunch of his own books and then talked with various cast members about what they were reading. He said that one woman kept the entire Harry Potter anthology inside of her pregnancy belly. Wyle, however, refuses to take credit for the lending library, although he jokingly noted that whoever did was an “incredibly noble and generous person. I can’t even imagine who would think of such a thing.”

He’s the best.

Source: Variety