ER creator Michael Crichton’s widow, Sherri Crichton, is not thrilled about The Pitt. To the point where she is suing.
According to Variety, Sherri felt like The Pitt was too similar to ER—which she'd been in talks to reboot with Warner Bros before the project was killed due to them not being able to come to terms. Despite this, streaming giant Max still wanted to make a medical series with Noah Wyle, and The Pitt was born.
Now Sherri is suing Noah—alongside The Pitt's creator R. Scott Gemmill, executive producer John Wells, and Warner Bros—for breach of contract, alleging that The Pitt is an ER revival “just under a different name” and is “a shameful betrayal of Crichton and his legacy.”
Noah's thoughts on the matter? He 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 actor added that once the ER reboot was killed, “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.”
“We really wanted to find something new for ourselves,” he continued. “And in some ways, that’s what was so disheartening about the whole thing. We really felt like we’d done it.”
