Noah Wyle 'profoundly sad' over The Pitt lawsuit from ER creator's widow
Noah Wyle was "profoundly sad and disappointed" to be sued by the widow of 'E.R.' creator Michael Crichton over his new series 'The Pitt'.
Noah Wyle was "profoundly sad and disappointed" to be sued by the widow of 'E.R.' creator Michael Crichton.
The 53-year-old actor - who shot to fame playing Dr. John Carter in the medical series - stars in and executive produces 'The Pitt', a real-time drama set in an emergency room and earlier this year, Sherri Crichton launched legal action against him, and others working on the Max series, including creator R. Scott Gemmill, executive producer John Wells and Warner Bros. Television for breach of contract, breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and intentional interference with contractual relations.
Sherri alleged 'The Pitt' was just an 'E.R.' revival "under a different name" in order to avoid giving her late husband a "created by" credit, which she branded a "shameful betrayal of [Michael] Crichton and his legacy.”
Asked about the suit, Noah told Variety: “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.
"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.”
The initial idea was for Noah to reprise his role as John in a revival of 'E.R.' and "got pretty close to being a reality before Warner Bros. Television were unable to agree terms with the Crichton estate.
And once the project fell apart, Noah insisted it was important for the team to "pivot 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.”
As a result, Noah's working-class Jewish character Dr. Michael 'Robby' Robinavitch was hugely different from the extremely wealthy Dr. Carter, and the cinematic camera work of 'E.R.' was a marked contrast to the docudrama-style of 'The Pitt'.
Noah said: “We really wanted to find something new for ourselves. And in some ways, that’s what was so disheartening about the whole thing. We really felt like we’d done it.”
Read the full interview with Noah at https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/noah-wyle-the-pitt-er-sequel-lawsuit-1236362824/.
