An appeals court has allowed the estate of Michael Crichton to pursue its copyright lawsuit against the creators and producers of The Pitt, the HBO Max medical drama. The ruling means the court considers the similarities between the two series substantial enough for the case to proceed toward a trial.
The estate alleges that The Pitt copies elements of ER, the NBC hospital drama that Crichton co-created and that ran for fifteen seasons from 1994 to 2009. The claims cover characters, setting and storylines from the original series. Crichton died in 2008. The Pitt stars Noah Wyle, who also starred in ER, a connection that has drawn attention to the comparison between the shows.
The Pitt follows an emergency department over a single shift in Pittsburgh. The central question in the case is whether the similarities go beyond general ideas that cannot be owned, such as a hospital setting or a team of overworked doctors, and reach protectable expression. That distinction is a long-standing issue in copyright law for television, where genre conventions are common and shared.
The appeals court's decision does not settle the matter. The case must still be decided on its merits, and the outcome remains uncertain. The ruling reverses or upholds an earlier lower-court decision, though the precise procedural posture is not fully clear from the available coverage. The defendants' formal response to the claims has not yet been detailed in reporting. No damages figure and no trial date have been reported.
The decision was covered by the BBC and Yahoo, which reported the same ruling. For the entertainment industry, the case is a test of how far a new medical drama can draw on the familiar conventions of an established hit before those borrowings become infringement.