A court has ruled that famed medical drama The Pitt is similar enough to ER to allow Michael Crichton’s widow to move forward with a lawsuit.
A three-judge panel unanimously denied an appeal from Warner Bros. Television on Wednesday, November 4, which argued that The Pitt and ER are unrelated to each other.
“There are clear and numerous similarities between The Pitt and ER; where those similarities lie, on a ladder of abstraction protecting only the more specific expressions, is a matter of ‘degree,’” the court ruled, per NBC News. “Making favorable inferences in Roadrunner’s favor, as we must, we find the details here suffice for a prima facie case.”
The appeals court, however, dismissed a claim against The Pitt creators Noah Wyle, John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill. The court ruled that the group was not aware that they could be violating contractual rights with Crichton, one of the creators of ER.
Crichton, who died in 2008, had a contract with Warner Bros. Television that included a “frozen rights” provision preventing the studio from making any spinoffs or reboots without his approval.
Michael’s widow, Sherri Crichton, filed a lawsuit in August 2024 before the premiere of The Pitt. She alleged that Wells and Wyle initially had hopes to reboot ER but did not receive her permission, thus creating The Pitt.
Warner Bros. Television then filed a motion to throw out the suit under California’s anti-SLAPP statute, which aims to protect individuals from free speech related lawsuits. The motion was denied last year by judge Wendy Chang, who decided that Sherri had enough evidence to move forward. With the ruling on Wednesday, the lawsuit will now proceed at the trial court.
“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 said in a statement to Deadline.
ER aired from 1994 to 2009, centering around the life of an emergency room in a fictionalized version of Chicago’s Cook County Hospital. More than a decade later, The Pitt premiered on Max and was described as “a realistic examination of the challenges facing healthcare workers in today’s America as seen through the lens of the frontline heroes working in a modern-day hospital in Pittsburgh.” In The Pitt, the 15 episodes showcase 15 hours of one shift in the emergency room.
“John, Max and Warner Brothers were on board to try to make use of this new platform of streaming, to see whether or not we could tell the story in a visually more arresting way than we did back in the ’90s,” Wyle explained to TVLine in January 2025. “It is a more photorealistic way than we were ever able to do, and in a more organic, performance-based way. Because you’re no longer to standards and practices and language [barriers], you really can paint with all the colors on the palette. The question isn’t ‘What can you show?’ Instead it is, ‘What should you show, in discretion and taste?’”
