In a new cover story for VARIETY, “ER” alum Noah Wyle speaks with Senior Entertainment Writer Adam B. Vary about playing an on-screen doctor again—this time as beleaguered Pittsburgh emergency room physician Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch in “The Pitt.” Wyle discusses why he wanted to return to the medical drama genre, an “ER” reboot, being sued by the estate of “ER” creator Michael Crichton, fostering camaraderie on set, and more.
On considering an “ER” reboot: After the pandemic, Wyle, executive producer of “ER” and “The Pitt” John Wells, and former “ER” showrunner R. Scott Gemmill traded messages and had Zoom calls about the possibility of bringing John Carter—Wyle’s character on “ER”—back to television.
“It would look a lot more like a small character piece centered around Carter 15 years later, dropping in on him wherever he was to make a jeremiad scream from the mountaintop about what was happening.”
On being sued by the estate of “ER” creator Michael Crichton: The “ER” revival “got pretty close to being a reality,” Wyle says, but it fell apart when Warner Bros. Television couldn’t come to terms with the Crichton’s estate, which was overseen by his widow, Sherri Crichton. But Wyle’s determination to put a spotlight back on first responders hadn’t dimmed, and Max still wanted to make a medical series with him even if he wasn’t playing Dr. Carter. Once the writers strike concluded in the fall of 2023, the team rapidly put together what ultimately became “The Pitt.” By July 2024, they were filming on the Warner Bros. lot.
The next month, Crichton sued Wells, Gemmill, Wyle and Warner Bros. TV for breach of contract. She alleged that “The Pitt” was nothing more than an “ER” revival, “just under a different name” to escape their obligation to give her late husband a “created by” credit, which the suit calls “a shameful betrayal of [Michael] Crichton and his legacy.”
“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.”
Wyle stresses that once an “ER” reboot was a nonstarter, “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.”
On why he wanted to play a doctor again: Although Wyle was set on not playing a doctor following the “ER” finale in 2009, he began getting DMs on Instagram from first responders during the 2020 COVID lockdown overwhelmed by the first waves of COVID-19. Some thanked Wyle for inspiring them to pursue a medical career with his performance on “ER,” but most of the messages were laced with an unmistakable desperation about the precarious state of the country’s health care workers—and how no one was telling their story.
“They were saying things like, ‘Carter, where are you?’ ‘It’s really hard out here.’”
Scrolling through DM after DM, however, ignited a new sense of purpose in Wyle. “The light bulb that went off for me was, I could use Carter the way I used to use Carter—to talk about how I feel now.”
All in all, Wyle’s work is inspired by his lifelong reverence for medical professionals.
“These people sacrifice so much in the service of others that I find it absolutely infuriating that their expertise is being called into question. I find it infuriating that we still can’t come to a consensus that masks cut down on transmission of disease. I find it infuriating that we still won’t acknowledge that vaccines are an important way of eradicating disease. I find it all infuriating that we are where we are right now. So I wanted to make a show that brings back into sharp focus what an objective medical fact is.”
On building the same camaraderie on “The Pitt” that defined his time on “ER”: “We see each other fall in love, get married, have children, get divorced. Those relationships transcend the screen and become palpable to an audience who wants to be part of that family. I’ve tried to create it in every job I’ve gone on, but with varying degrees of success.”
As an executive producer from the start, Wyle could for the first time establish the environment of his show from the ground up. Along with their audition sides, prospective actors received a “mission statement” Wyle wrote about the caliber of performers he was seeking.
On his aversion to the word “mentor” to describe his relationship with the cast: “It presupposes that I am a mentor to these young performers. Neither one of those performers need mentors. Neither one of those performers should look to me as anything other than their scene partner. They’re doing fine!”
[Photo Credit: Chantal Anderson for Variety, Courtesy of Variety Magazine]
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