Warner Bros. TV warns ER lawsuit threatens not just The Pitt, but whole industry

The issue behind this lawsuit is that Wyle, Wells, and Gemmill were originally attempting to reboot ER for WBTV. However, they weren’t able to come to an agreement with the Crichton estate, so they decided to make something new instead. “The only thing that I can legally speak to is how I feel emotionally, which is just profoundly sad and disappointed,” Wyle said of the lawsuit earlier this year. “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 new filing calls the suit from the Crichton estate “baseless,” arguing that “The Pitt is no more a ‘derivative work’ of ER than is any other hospital drama. The Pitt involves different characters, a different plot, different themes, a different setting, and a different storytelling device (with each episode of The Pitt occurring in real time over a single hour, unlike ER, where each 45-minute episode covered, at minimum, an entire day-long shift). The shows’ only similarities are (1) they are both medical dramas set in emergency departments—like dozens of other shows—and (2) they share a single actor, Defendant Noah Wyle, playing different characters.”

The work the team did on the scrapped ER reboot has worked against them, but the appeal argues that any similarities between the planned reboot and The Pitt “did not come from ER—they were new ideas proposed by Defendant R. Scott Gemmill in a reboot treatment he created over a decade after ER last aired. There is no legal reason why he would not have been free to incorporate those same original ideas into a different project, The Pitt, after the proposed reboot fell through.”

To conclude, the appeal states, “Plaintiff’s attempt to use a narrow contract term to seize control over any emergency medical drama Defendants might work on is an outright assault on free expression, and a terrible precedent for California’s film and television industry. If this suit is not dismissed pursuant to Defendants’ anti-SLAPP motion, The Pitt’s creative team will be forced to do their work under the threat of liability and with the constant distraction and expense of litigation and discovery.”

There is not yet any date set for the trial or even for the appeal to be argued, so we’ll have to wait and see if this filing is effective. As for the reaction from the other side: “There is nothing new from Warner Bros. in this filing,” a lawyer for the Critchton Trust told Deadline. “Instead, it’s just a rehash of arguments the trial court has already soundly rejected.”