Bowen Dunnan
In January 2025, a new medical drama The Pitt premiered on Warner Bros.’s Max streaming service. The show, which has been well received by critics, viewers, and the medical community,[1] is set in a Pittsburgh hospital’s emergency room and stars Noah Wyle as Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch. Television viewers may recognize Wyle as one of the stars of the classic 1994-2009 hospital show ER, in which he played Dr. John Carter.
According to the estate of ER’s creator Michael Crichton (who also wrote the novel Jurassic Park, among many other hits), that may not be the only significant connection between the two series. In August 2024, Sherri Crichton, Michael’s widow, sued the producers of The Pitt for breach of contract, claiming that the new show was an unauthorized sequel to ER that violated the “frozen rights” clause in her husband’s original 1994 contract assigning the ER copyright to Warner Bros. That provision stated that “any and all sequels, remakes, spin-offs and/or other derivative works [of ER]…shall be frozen, with mutual agreement between Crichton and Warner Bros. being necessary in order to move forward in any of these categories.”[2] The estate claims that The Pitt is indeed such a derivative work and that Warner Bros.’s moving forward with the show without the participation of the Crichton estate (and a “created by” credit for Crichton) was a breach of contract.
In fact, according to the estate, the producers of what ultimately became The Pitt did approach them in 2022 to discuss rebooting ER. After these negotiations fell through, they went on to create The Pitt instead, with several of the same executive producers who had worked on ER along with Wyle.[3]
The producers of The Pitt sought to have the Crichton estate’s case dismissed with an anti-SLAPP motion, relying on a law designed to prevent frivolous lawsuits against protected speech. But the anti-SLAPP statute only directs courts to dismiss suits that are completely without merit, and in February 2025 a California state court announced a ruling allowing the suit to proceed past Warner Bros.’s motion. The court held that the estate’s case met the minimal standard to move forward: “Plaintiffs’ evidence establish a timeline of various communications and events to show the negotiations with the Estate over an ER reboot, failure of those negotiations, and the creation of The Pitt.”[4]
The Crichton estate’s spokesperson celebrated the court’s ruling, calling The Pitt “a carbon copy of ER” and saying that the estate “looks forward to presenting its case to a jury and is confident it will prevail.”[5] But on the other side, one of the named defendants, John Wells (who was an executive producer of ER beginning with the pilot in 1994 and now is an executive producer of The Pitt), wrote that “The Pitt was not based on ER…In fact, our goal…was to produce an entirely new medical drama—that viewers would see as different from any other medical drama that has been on television to date.”[6]
At this procedural stage, the court has not yet evaluated the actual merits of the copyright question underlying the breach of contract claim—that is, “whether The Pitt is a derivative work or otherwise infringes the copyright of ER.”[7] While the plaintiffs will point to the started-and-stopped negotiations in 2022 to argue that The Pitt is an ER reboot hiding under another name, the defendants will likely argue that the shows’ shared emergency room setting is common to many hospital dramas and does not constitute protected expression that falls within ER’s exclusive rights. If the case does proceed to the merits of the copyright issue before a settlement, then it may be up to a California jury to decide just how far the estate’s ER monopoly reaches.
[1] Reggie Ugwu, Busy Doctors Can’t Get Enough of “The Pitt”, N.Y. Times (Feb. 19, 2025) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/arts/television/pitt-doctors-noah-wyle.html.
[2] Melanie J. Howard & Chloe Gordils, Roadrunner JMTC v. Warner Bros. Television, Loeb & Loeb IP/Entertainment Case Law Updates (Mar. 7, 2025) https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2025/03/roadrunner-jmtc-v-warner-bros-television.
[3] Id.
[4] Minute Order at 6, Roadrunner JMTC LLC v. Warner Bros. Television (Sup. Ct. of Cal. Feb. 24, 2025) (Docket No. 24STCV21825), https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/pitt-rulking.pdf.
[5] Gene Maddus, Judge Allows Crichton Estate To Pursue Lawsuit Over “The Pitt”, Variety (Feb. 25, 2025) https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/crichton-estate-the-pitt-lawsuit-anti-slapp-ruling-1236319934/.
[6] Id.
[7] Minute Order at 5.