The copyright in ER belongs to Warner Bros., but Michael Crichton’s contract kept him a veto over its reboots, and eighteen years after his death a California appeals court has let his widow test it against The Pitt.
1974 to 1994
The script that became ER came from Michael Crichton’s own time as a medical student. He wrote it in 1974, and it reached television twenty years later, by which point its author was rather better known for other things.
When ER arrived on NBC in 1994, Crichton signed a contract with Warner Bros. Television (WBTV) and Amblin Entertainment, Steven Spielberg’s company. One provision in it has since cost a great many lawyers their weekends. It is known as the frozen rights provision, and it meant that no spinoff or reboot of ER could be made without Crichton’s approval. According to a brief filed in the Court of Appeal and published by Deadline, his rights under that 1994 contract passed after his death to the plaintiff now suing.
ER ran on NBC until 2009 and collected nearly two dozen Emmy Awards. Hits of that size are rarely left alone for long.
2008
Crichton died of cancer on 4 November 2008. ER outlived him by a single season.
His estate is controlled by his widow, Sherri Crichton. The widows of famous writers are usually expected to tend the reputation, sign off on the anthologies and say something gracious at the centenary. This one has spent the past two years attending to the small print.
2020 to 2022
The estate’s version of events begins in 2020, when, it alleges, John Wells, who had been ER’s original showrunner, began trying to reboot the show for Max.
By 2022, the estate says, it had been told of the project and negotiations had begun. It says it was promised a “created by” credit for Crichton, backed by a $5 million guarantee for the estate if the credit was not given. Talks over crediting Crichton and compensating his estate then broke down, according to the estate. All of this remains the estate’s account, and none of it has been tested in court.
2024
In March 2024 The Pitt was announced. It follows emergency-room doctors, it stars Noah Wyle, who also starred in ER, and several ER veterans steer it. It is set in Pittsburgh rather than Chicago, which the estate did not regard as a sufficient change of scenery.
In August 2024 Sherri Crichton sued WBTV and the show’s creators in Los Angeles Superior Court. The complaint put the estate’s position in four words, “The Pitt is ER”, and a Crichton spokesperson said he had “made the studio billions” over their partnership and warned that “no creator is safe”.
This is a breach-of-contract case, fought in state court over the frozen rights clause, with no copyright claim at its centre. WBTV owns the copyrights in the shows. Whether The Pitt counts as a “derivative” of ER is the contractual question, argued with one eye on copyright law.
February 2025
The Pitt had premiered only weeks before Judge Wendy Chang of the Superior Court ruled on WBTV’s attempt to have the suit thrown out under California’s anti-SLAPP statute. She refused, finding Sherri Crichton had offered enough evidence to proceed.
The test at that stage is whether a claim has “minimal merit”. It is a low bar, the estate cleared it, and WBTV appealed.
4 November 2026
A three-judge panel of California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled unanimously that the estate could carry on. The opinion runs to 33 pages, Rolling Stone reported, and it is unpublished. It was written by Curtis Karnow, retired from the San Francisco Superior Court and assigned to the panel by the state’s chief justice, according to Bloomberg Law.
The court held that the estate had sufficiently shown a breach of the frozen rights provision, despite WBTV owning the copyrights. Karnow said there was enough initial evidence that The Pitt is a derivative of ER, even on the “more stringent definition” the defendants had urged.
“There are clear and numerous similarities between ‘The Pitt’ and ‘ER’,” the panel wrote, as Variety reported.
The court listed them: the emergency-room setting, the fast pace, the medical jargon, the graphic injuries, and a young, incompetent doctor fresh from medical school. Viewers of either programme will know the type. It has been a fixture of hospital drama since long before streaming, and it now features in an appellate opinion.
The estate did not have everything its own way. The panel reversed and dismissed the claims of intentional interference with contract against Noah Wyle, John Wells and his company, R. Scott Gemmill, The Pitt’s creator and showrunner, and WarnerMedia Direct, the entity behind HBO Max. It found no evidence that any of them knew they could be violating Crichton’s contractual rights.
WBTV said in a statement that The Pitt is an “entirely original series” and maintained that the claims are without merit. Sherri Crichton said she was deeply gratified by the decision and wanted the case to go through discovery and before a jury.
The ruling fell eighteen years to the day after her husband’s death. Nobody has suggested the date was chosen.
The months ahead
TheWrap reports that the case now moves to discovery and a jury trial. Variety says a jury could ultimately decide whether The Pitt is a derivative of ER, unless the two sides settle first. The court has not decided that one show copied the other, and nobody has proved anything. The estate has shown enough to keep going, which at this stage is all the law asks of it.
What makes the case worth following is less the television than the paper. A clause negotiated when ER was a pilot has bound a studio through a change of network era, a change of owner’s name on the streaming service and the death of the man it protected. Readers who followed Andrew Mellon and Roosevelt will recognise the genre, in which the signature does its arguing long after the signatory has stopped.
WBTV has the copyrights, the hit and a statement calling the show original. The estate has a 1994 contract and a unanimous panel that says its claim may proceed. No trial date has been set.
