Is my favorite new TV show this year a ripoff?

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Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vote.
This week, a question, a medium-sized question.

When is it okay to copy somebody else's idea? Their song, their joke, their story? What is the difference between inspiration and a rip-off?

Most of us agree that stealing ideas is wrong, but we also all know that it's complicated. All artists borrow.
There's such a thing as inspiration.

If the thing borrowed is changed enough, transformed, recontextualized, reimagined, it's okay. So the actual determination, unless we're talking about word-for-word plagiarism, can be hard to make.

Or hard for most of us. Not so hard for most of the creative people I know.
Most of them are dead certain in their hearts that they can tell exactly when they're being ripped off. And it bothers them.

Most people I talk to who make stuff have this gremlin, this voice in their head that gets a little obsessive, that tells them they can see exactly who has copied their homework and how, and wishes on some deep level that they did not have to smile and pretend to not notice it.

They wish they could get a creative restraining order. I'll be honest with you.
I have this gremlin too, and I've had this feeling. And when I have, I've just told myself not to give into it.

I remind myself that I borrow too, that no idea is really truly original. And sometimes that even works.
But it's work trying to be better than your worst impulses.

And so this week's story is emotionally satisfying to me because it's just about someone having one of these fights in public. Publicly feuding about whether or not a story had been stolen.

Stolen from a person who at the time the story was written was dead.

And this possibly stolen stolen story happened to have been one of the more celebrated TV shows this year.

Good morning, Sunshine. You obviously haven't seen this board.
Ah, we've seen worse. Nothing like a little challenge every now and then to keep everybody on their toes.
Dr. Rabinovich, Melissa.

The Pitt is an emergency medical drama set at a hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is Nicholas Kulish, the person I first heard the story from.

Nick works at the the New York Times, where he's known for his sharp, deeply reported investigations.

The Pit is a show where doctors and nurses save the lives of patients who come into the emergency room.

I think the thing that is most different about it from other shows is that it takes place in real time. Yes.
So an hour of the show is an hour of the shift in the emergency room.

Melissa King, I will be joining you today. I just came from two months in the VA.
Hey, welcome to the Pit. This is Dr.
Jack Abbott.

Nice to meet you. I can't take how excited I am to be here today.

Talk to me at the end of the day. Ignore me.
So that's the pit, a critically acclaimed, highly streamed medical drama that I lost some sleep binging this year.

And now I'm going to play you a clip of the show it's been accused of brazenly stealing from.

Perhaps the most famous hospital drama ever created. E.R.
John Carter. Yes, sir.
Peter Benton.

You the surgical student? Yep. Third year.
Good. We're going to be spending a lot of time together, so let me show you around so you'll be oriented.
This is the admitting desk.

If you need someone paged or a chart called up, you do it here. This is Timmy.
Don't shake his hand. He's afraid of disease.
This is the way to the laugh.

And how would you describe ER to somebody who hasn't seen it? ER is an emergency room

medical drama set in a fictional hospital in the city of Chicago where

a bunch of doctors go around saving lives. Do you know how to start an IV? Uh, actually, no.
I thought you were third year. I am, but all I've done is dermatology and psychiatry.

The well-dressed specialties, huh?

Well, you'll find that surgeons actually hardly. So on the one side, you have that show, ER.

And on the other,

the pit.

And the question is whether the person who created ER should also get credit for creating the pit.

On the one hand, the shows definitely have some similarities, which we'll discuss.

On the other, the creator of ER is Michael Crichton, a wonderful writer who also happens to to have died 16 years ago.

How someone who died during the Bush administration could be viewed as the author of a TV show written last year sounds like maybe a Michael Crichton plotline from some novel about cryogenics gone wrong.

But actually, the story of Crichton's very unusual career helps us understand how we got here today.

I asked Nick to tell me about it.

So, one thing that I am slightly like surprised that I did not know, I did not know that Michael Creighton created ER. Michael Creighton to me is Jurassic Park guy.

Can you just give me the backstory of Michael Creighton as a person?

Yeah, I mean, the story of Michael Creighton as a person is pretty amazing.

He was going to medical school and times were so different in those days that writing novels was a way to make money on the side to help pay for medical school. How is that possible?

Like, legitimately, how is that possible?

Well, nobody had cell phones in their hands, smartphones to look at, to scroll on. And so many people, instead of scrolling on phones, had these paperback books in their hands that they read.

This makes me so sad.

And people paid a lot of money for these books. They weren't ad supported? No, they paid very little money for them, but it was good money for the time.

So you would actually go into a drugstore and there would be these wire rack stands that had these cheap paperbacks on them, trashy romance novels or thrillers or whatever, and people would pick them up for next to no money and you'd read it while you stood in line at the DMV.

And so Michael Crichton was writing books under a pseudonym.

or actually under two pseudonyms, but mostly under one that were these kinds of, you know, thriller, action-y kind of books, and they were selling well.

But the thing he thought he was going to be was a doctorate. Yes.

he was going to medical school and he also started doing the hospital routine which he did in massachusetts and boston and those experiences are very much a part of the screenplay that he wrote and so he but again it's not like he's in medical school Novel writing is something you can do for like side cash before he gets to writing his medical drama script, like what knocks him off the path of

doctor who writes his way through medical school to just like writer? Like what happens?

I think probably the answer to that question is a book and a movie called The Andromeda Strain, which I have not read or seen. Yeah, it's really strange.

The Andromeda Strain came out before I was born and I actually saw it for the first time in a small almost hut in Tanzania.

Why were you in a small almost hut in Tanzania? I used to be the East Africa correspondent for the New York Times, and I was writing a story about sort of rural farmland issues.

And I guess this old rabbit ear broadcast television in Tanzania, you know, they're playing older movies because maybe they're not paying for the rights. Sorry to bust your spot there, Tanzania.

Or they're just paying for really old movies because they're cheaper. And I just was sitting there watching this thing, and it's pretty gripping.

Basically, it's the story of an alien pathogen that arrives on planet Earth

and starts killing people.

All reports continue to indicate that the experiment was successful.

Then we can feel confident your so-called biological crisis is over. As far as Andromeda is concerned, yes, we have the organism at wildfire and we continue to study.

And so it's like a medical mystery of what do we do and how do we solve this? And it's so hard because everything is different. You know, the cell structure is different.

And so it's outer space contagion before contagion. However, with this new knowledge, there's no guarantee that another so-called biological crisis won't occur again.

What do we do about that?

Precisely so.

What do we do?

And the movie was a big deal, and suddenly he was a big-time novelist, but also a big-time Hollywood guy.

And so what happens then, like, even still, like, pre-ER, what does the rise of Michael Creighton look like from the Andromeda stream?

Well, so he also takes a detour into directing.

So he wrote and directed a movie called Westworld. The robotic cowboy movie that they turned into an HBO show later.
Exactly. I mean, the breadth of his imagination and ability

to think up these scenarios is pretty incredible.

Although I did have a funny insight while writing the story, which was I was like, Westworld, robots in a theme park, like run amok and start killing people. And I'm like, dinosaurs in a theme park.

He loves

Westworld and Jurassic Park are the same movie with robots instead of dinosaurs instead of robots. He had some like deeply held fear of amusement parks that he

millions and millions of dollars. There must have been a terrible incident where he was left behind.

Yeah, I mean, I remember, it's funny, when I encountered him, it was like Jurassic Park came out when I was in grade school. It was like the scary movie that your friends dared dared you to watch.

Mr. Hammond, I think we're back in business.

So then picking up his books felt like

it felt like heady intellectual work because he would fill his science fiction with lots of science. And so you would be sort of like, like, I remember reading Jurassic Park.

I remember reading The Lost World. And you feel like

he gives you the feeling almost of being like an academic.

Like if you're not looking down on him, if you're looking up to him, it's a really fun reading experience because you feel like you're really parsing something. What about the lysine contingency?

We could put that into effect. What's that? That is absolutely out of the question.
The lysine contingency is intended to prevent the spread of the animals in case they ever get off the island. Dr.

Wu inserted a gene that creates a single faulty enzyme in protein metabolism. The animals can't manufacture the amino acid lysine.

Unless they're completely supplied with lysine by us, they swim into a coma and die.

But then there's exciting scenes where dinosaurs and people and stuff. Yeah, although I did want to mention something.
You said The Lost World. Yeah.

And I do find myself thinking about The Lost World a lot in the larger context of this story and like whose story is whose and what belongs to the world and what belongs to the writer or the estate.

Because The Lost World is the name. of a book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known for the Sherlock Holmes series.
And The Lost World is about

finding dinosaurs in contemporary time, like humans interacting with dinosaurs. Yeah.

Huh. I didn't know that.
And so The Lost World is an inspiration, I believe, for the Jurassic Park books. And that's fine because it's in the public domain.

You know, it's old enough that anybody can do that. But that idea,

that larger question of when is culture something that we all use and that we're all able to riff on on versus when is culture something that is like locked up and locked down and belongs to this one person?

Because I think,

I think it used to be more normal to sort of say, yeah, you know, somebody's going to write a book with some dinosaurs in it. And now it's like, that's IP.
This notion of IP, like whose IP is this?

Yeah, I find like the word IP itself to be like a bad Andromeda strain where it seems to infect the minds of people who make anything ever at all, where they're like, my IP, my IP.

And like this idea that once an idea has occurred to you, whether it was inspired by someone else, whether it really sprung completely from your mind, it is like something you have to protect, like land rights.

Like it's just an instinct that I don't love. And I didn't know that about the lost world, but it's interesting because it's like by nodding to

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it's like he's making a kind of statement of values, which is to say, it's okay to borrow ideas. It's okay to have a spin on somebody else's idea.
Like

even an idea as outlandish as dinosaurs are back, which really I'm surprised anyone else that had, like everything is probably going to come from somewhere else. Yep, absolutely.

So Michael Creighton was an incredibly prolific and successful writer who, at least sometimes, was inspired by other people's ideas.

The story of how he would come to create ER, the TV show, it actually starts as a movie script Creighton had written inspired by his med school experiences. It was called Emergency Ward.

So the Emergency Ward script had been kicking around for a while. And by a while, I think it might be like 20 years.
And it just kind of sat.

And there was an idea from Spielberg that they would turn it into a TV show.

But then they got distracted by the dinosaurs, as we all do. Yes.
And they did the dinosaur thing. And then they came back and they were like, well, what about this hospital idea?

And the hospital idea has deep, deep roots.

When Nick says the hospital idea has deep, deep roots, he means that the genre goes back before the invention even of TV.

This is a medical radio drama that premiered in 1937 called Dr. Christian.
Oh, Dr. Christian!

All told, more than a dozen radio medical dramas would find their way onto American airwaves. But the genre really explodes when it moves to television in the 1950s.

Dr. Crane, we're simply frantic with worry about David.
This is such an important moment in his career.

Yes.

Won't you be seated, please? Thank you. This is a clip from the first ever TV medical drama, City Hospital.
We'll operate as soon as we can.

I told that to David, but just when that will be, I can't say. In the intervening decades, more than 50 medical dramas hit American television sets.
They get set in different hospitals.

Sometimes they're grittier. And at least once the doctor is a teenager.
But for the most part, it's a genre not prone to innovation. Diagnosis is definite now.
Hodgkin's disease. Don't tell my father.

I have no choice. What's the matter? Afraid of a little blood?

It's beating. All right.

Look at that.

Oh my gosh.

I like to say about hospital shows, like, where else can

a baby be born and a life be heroically saved every single day or every single episode and it not strain credulity? Right. Right.
It's a place where actual drama happens.

I will say I had to go to the emergency room like a month and a half ago for something that turned out to be nothing. And I was so disappointed.

Like I was sitting in the emergency room and like nothing particularly exciting was happening. Like people were not moving very quickly.
No one was screaming.

I was there for like three hours because I was very low priority. And this is a kind of a messed up thing to say, but at the very end, a person came in having like a psychotic break.

And I was a little bit like, finally, like drunk.

You were very lucky because when I was a teenager, I went for what I thought was a broken foot, but turned out to be a sprained ligament. Oh, no.

And they brought someone in, an older middle-aged man, and they did the whole like, clear, clear, like working on him. And then

they

pronounced him dead. And then all turned around at once and saw me sitting on the bed next to him.
And then somebody just pulled the curtain closed in front of me.

And I thought, they really should have done that right away.

And I was like, traumatized is a more popular word now than it was in those days. But yeah, it definitely left with me.
It left a mark. It left a really bad mark.

So to recap. Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg decide to take this old unmade film script and turn it into a TV show.
In order to do that, they need a showrunner.

So they bring in another person who will turn out to be a key character in our story, a person who will end up being on the other side of the upcoming legal battle, John Wells.

Basically, a meeting is set up between Michael Creighton

and a TV writer named John Wells.

who had been working on a Vietnam hospital show called China Beach. MASH already existed.
MASH had already existed. Right.

So China Beach is a little bit of a MASH for like the late 80s, early 90s.

And so these two guys, the successful novelist whose Jurassic Park book is everywhere, including my bedroom, and this TV writer coming off this hospital show and they're bringing them together and they have this meeting of the minds and they agree to make this show and they agree that they'll never talk down to the viewers.

They will always throw medical jargon at them that they don't understand, but they won't mind because they'll just enjoy letting it run past them with verisimilitude. And that's all true.

Like, that was part of what was working about the show is that it felt adult and real relative to what people were used to. Yeah, I think that that was definitely a big part of it.

Dr. Green.
I mean, the thing about the ER screenplay, the pilot eventually of the show, is it's not dinosaurs, right? Dr. Green.

What is it?

Patient for you, Dr. Green.

Can't the intern take it. Nice for you.
It's about this doctor who is sleeping in a glorified broom closet, who keeps getting woken up to go and deal with patients. Can't the intern take it? It's Dr.

Ross.

Dr. Ross.

I'll be right there. And it's 24 hours in his life.
And he's trying to decide whether to go and work at a fancy medical practice where he'll make tons tons more money, but,

you know, it's implied that he'll sort of be helping wealthy dowagers

or stay in this exhausting, desperate place where gunshot wound victims come in and it's like you're saving lives, you're exhausted, and you're not making money. So it's like a

very realistic take on medicine. But so

I watched the pilot and did not finish it. I found it to be sort of like, I was surprised at how slow it was.
Maybe you were just overly immune to the dreaminess of young George Clooney.

He looks really good. Because

that was a big part of, I think, the early appeal of the show.

Obviously, ER was successful for reasons beyond George Clooney's intoxicating dreaminess.

My favorite TV critic, Alan Seppenwald has called that first season among the most self-assured debuts the medium has ever had.

ER was such a huge hit. It's actually hard for me to find modern things to compare it to.

It ran for 15 seasons, it garnered 124 Emmy nominations, had vast global syndication, we just don't really make TV that big today.

It was a hit during a much more profitable time for television, and it would make its creators an astonishing amount of money.

There's this figure that is thrown around in the court documents that says that that Michael Crichton made $800,000 of back end on each ER episode, and there were 331, I believe, episodes.

And I did the math. It was about a quarter of a billion dollars, give or take, for Michael Crichton's take.
A quarter of a billion dollars? Yes. Okay.
For Michael Crichton, this part of ER.

That's also Steven Spielberg's company's take.

Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg, crucially, They were not involved in the day-to-day operation of the show. It was their initial idea.

But when it came to actually filling those 331 episodes with stories of different things that could happen in the hospital, that responsibility ultimately rested with showrunner John Wells and with the writers he managed.

In one email that would later end up in court records, John Wells did point out that despite having worked on ER for more than a decade, he earned less than half of what either Crichton or Spielberg made.

Although he added, quote, that's not a complaint, it's the deal I made.

If privately the gremlin in John Wells' Wells' head felt differently, or if he even had a gremlin in his head, that we can't know.

In the end, ER was just not his IP, which meant in some sense, he would always be a renter, not an owner.

After the break, a new hospital show arrives.

Or does it?

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Welcome back to the show.

So when I started watching the pit as a person who totally skipped ER, One of the things that confused me was the pit's starring actor, the guy who plays Dr. Rabinovich.

I was confused because the actor was clearly in his mid-50s, a tremendous performer. And I just thought, how has this guy never been in anything? And also, how did he finally get this big role?

It turns out that that actor, Noah Wiley, is famous to lots of other people because he was one of ER's main characters. And Noah Wiley isn't just the star of the pit.

He was perhaps the driving force for getting the show on the air at all. Because for Noah Wiley, the pit was an opportunity to re-energize a Hollywood career that had cooled somewhat.

So to go back a step, when ER came out, it made stars of a couple people. George Cloney became a big star, who we all know as a movie star, but ER was really his thing.

And Juliana Margulies, you know, went on to be the good wife. And Noah Wiley, you know, who was younger, stuck with the show a lot longer.

I think he did 11 full seasons and then some additional appearances. So for him, ER was like a real job for more than a decade.
He didn't jump straight into Matinee Idol.

I think he did some other stuff. He played Steve Jobs in a very well-received made-for-TV movie about the tech industry.

But I think it's pretty clear for him that up until the pit, ER was the pinnacle of his success. Right.
And so that's how we find ourselves in February 2020 with Noah Wiley saying, hey,

I know what the world needs. The world needs a television show called Carter

about my most famous character, Dr. John Carter.
At the time, he name checks these things like Logan, right? You remember the movie Logan?

As I live and breathe, the Wolverine.

And he's a junkie now. Who the fuck are you?

You know, you got some buckshot in your door. Oh, it's so good.

It was like Logan Wolverine from X-Men, but they were like, we're just going to make a movie about him and it's going to be darker and sadder. I love Slogan.

Exactly. So he's like, we need a Logan for Dr.
John Carter. So the grizzled old guy, the white and the beard

is a feature, not a bug. Okay.
And of course he wants this. Like, wouldn't you like to go back to your most famous role that everybody loved you for? And what does it look like?

He's like sending emails. Is he trying to write the scripts? Like, what's happening?

He's emailing people like John Wells, who worked on ER a lot in some of the later seasons.

And so, yeah, so there's this like, let's get the band back together and let's do an ER again, but coincidentally focused on my character.

Which sounds like a little bit silly and like, whatever, except for like, they do make it. It's great.
He's great.

I am legally obliged to say that Warner Brothers Television would not say that they made it. They would say that they made the different show.

They do say it quite forcefully in lots of court documents. But yes, they ended up making a hospital emergency room drama starring Noah Wiley as a grizzled old emergency room doctor.

You're afraid of making a mistake? I'm always afraid of making a mistake, aren't you? Yeah, of course I am, but you know what I mean.

You make a mistake once and somebody dies and you feel so badly about it, you'll never let it happen. How is that wrong? Because you waste time and money on unnecessary tests.

You keep sick patients waiting too long. And

people really got into it. And one of the things that people seem to like about it is that it's not the bear.
Oh, no, I'm just kidding.

Did I say that? That is a thing that I liked about it. Right.
They weren't like, oh, we're like having a special episode where it's all about like this one surgeon who like sits with a scalpel

or, you know,

we should probably cut that. No, it's not a show that's like lost in its own poeticness.
It's just like, let's save lives hour after hour, bring in a new patient in on the gurney.

Like, let's let's keep doing this. Let's raise the stakes.
Being here

means no matter how good you are or how hard you try, you're going to make another mistake. And someone else might even die.
That's called being an emergency medicine doctor.

If you can't accept that, then maybe this isn't a place for you. I can accept that.

You sure?

Yes. Okay.

Good.

Go save some lives.

Clear some beds while you're at it.

The doctors are being doctors, and that's all I want is to just watch these people be good at being doctors. Thank you so much.

It must be so satisfying for Noah Wiley where it's just like it's the fantasy that never works out where you're like what if I could go back and he goes back and it turns out like people love hospital shows the same way they always loved hospital shows.

Yeah, I mean for Noah Wiley, it couldn't have gone better. Like he was nominated multiple times for Emmys

for ER and he never won. And then he was like, let's do another hospital show.
And he just won his first ever Emmy for best actor. So I mean, yeah, it could not have turned out better for him.

So, okay, so tell me, how does the drama around the drama start? The real life drama? Well,

before the pit had even debuted, there was a lawsuit filed in California court that said that

it was the Michael Crichton estate, and they said that it was an unauthorized sequel to or reboot of ER.

And did they want to stop it from being made? They wanted to stop it. I think it had already been made, but but they were trying to stop it from being aired.

The first step that Warner Brothers and the creative team behind the pit took was to try to have the case dismissed.

The courts did not agree in that the judge in California did not grant Warner Brothers' request. The judge was like, we're not just going to dismiss this lawsuit on anything.
Right.

The judge was like, you know what? There's more to this than meets the eye.

Here we have reached a surprising twist in our story. Not that the judge made an early ruling in favor of the entity trying to stop the pit.
The twist is the identity of that entity.

A character I did not expect to find in this story.

And so

who's behind the lawsuit? Like, who controls the Michael Crichton estate? Okay, so we have to go back a couple steps.

Michael Crichton,

four times divorced, with a teenage daughter, begins dating a

former soap opera actress named Sherry Alexander. Famous writer marries former soap opera star.
And tell me more.

Well, they have a romantic wedding in Hawaii in front of a waterfall, and she becomes pregnant, and

then he falls ill with cancer,

and he dies tragically while she's pregnant with their unborn son. And so

there's some back and forth over exactly who controls the estate and how, but at the end of it, Sherry Crichton ends up as the CEO of Crichton's son, which controls his archive and handles a lot of these kinds of rights negotiations.

And she is not a passive collector of royalties. Okay.

So since her husband passed away, they've done four Michael Crichton books. Two of them were books that he had written but hadn't published.

Another one is called Micro and is finished by an author named Richard Preston.

And then I think the best known work is called Eruption, and it's finished by James Patterson, becomes the New York Times' number one bestseller last year.

And

for a person who died in 2008, Michael Crichton has a pretty huge presence, right? As a person, you yourself is working on a book.

Posthumously, he's publishing, I think, more than you have recently.

That's a particularly mean, mean way of putting it.

Yes. He also has a lot more help, though.
Like if somebody was like, Nick Coolidge, we're giving you James Patterson.

Yeah, I was about to say, James Patterson, if you're listening, meet me at the Brooklyn Public Library on Sunday.

I could really use your help.

The Crichton Estate, led by Sherry Crichton, in addition to publishing books and approving new Jurassic Park movies, they also fight to make sure Michael Crichton keeps getting as much credit as possible on the new material that's made out of his old IP.

But crucially, for our story, the estate lost one of those fights not too long ago.

You can see that defeat happen in real time by watching the beautiful opening credits to the pilot of HBO's TV show Westworld, which came out in 2016.

While Michael Crichton's name appears in the show's credits, he's not listed as the show's creator, which to the estate felt disrespectful.

They firmly believe that he should have been considered the creator of the television series and that at the beginning of every episode of that show, it should have said created by Michael Crichton.

I mean, okay.

In their defense, I didn't know it was a Michael Crichton series. Not in their defense, one, I don't pay a lot of attention to things.
And two, he was dead at the time that they made the TV series.

Yes. This gets into the naughty K-N-O-T-T-Y

questions about intellectual property. Can dead people have new ideas? Or can dead people get credit for new ideas? Exactly.

It's like, how much credit do you give to the person whose idea has been reanimated by people after their death. And obviously, the estate is always going to have a maximalist view of this.

Definitely. And I think that for this story, what matters is the Crichton estate believed that Warner Brothers Television had not given proper credit and respect to their departed loved one.

And they held that grudge into future projects.

So the Crichton estate, led by Michael's widow, Sherry, tries to get as much posthumous credit on Michael Crichton's behalf as possible. But with Westworld, they feel like they didn't succeed.

Flash forward a decade to the moment at hand, as Nick mentioned, in August 2024, the Crichton estate tries to file a lawsuit to prevent the pit from ever seeing the light of day.

But the courts are slow, TV is relatively fast, and this past January, the Pitt premieres, and lots of people watch it, including Nick.

So before you started to actually look at the lawsuit, like, what did you walk in thinking?

So I think I found myself the way a lot of people would watching the TV show, scrolling on my phone, and reading that Michael Creighton's widow had sued the makers of The Pit,

saying that they owed her and the Michael Creighton estate, more importantly, for making this sort of ER reboot. And my reaction to that was, that's crazy.

It's not called ER. It's called The Pit.
Yeah. It's not set in Chicago.
It's set in Pittsburgh. That character's name is not Dr.
John Carter. It's Dr.
Rubinovich.

And like, hospital show is a genre. And hospital show is a genre.
So, you know, what's she up to? And I think there are some obvious stereotypes that come into play, right? The widow, you know.

Wait, the widow who's like trying to steal IP? That's not a stereotype. No, the widow's wringing money out of the.

I think there's like people have those like the greedy widow ideas, right? Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But when I started looking into it, because I'm the kind of person who watches a TV show and reads the Wikipedia page and then starts downloading court documents.

It's so funny because the human impulse of I just watch a show, I want to read something on the internet, I also have.

It's never extended for me to court documents around the production, and I'm slightly jealous. Well, I mean, it should.
Court documents are, as we'll see, the best. So, what do you find?

Well,

what I find is a much more complicated story because,

in the parlance of your time, Sherry Creighton has a lot of receipts. Oh.

Sherry Creighton has a lot of emails.

And these emails are from John Wells,

Noah Wiley, and they are very detailed and very emotive.

And they are saying, hey, we want to remake ER and this is how we're proposing to do it with this real-time show where you're in the emergency room hour by hour with the older, grizzled, Logan-style Dr.

Carter. I see.
So they'd ask for permission first.

Yes. They very,

very clearly ended up in negotiations with the Creighton Estate about rebooting ER with a show that to the layperson looks a lot like the show that ended up being the pit.

Can you read any of these emails?

So

here's an email that was attached to sherry crichton's declaration to the court

that is

from noah wiley to john wells

and it says subject line a not so crazy idea

i then had my not so crazy idea a character study in the vein of Logan, Picard, and Joker,

Carter. Carter.

A 12-episode Hulu Limited series where we take another look at the guy who showed us the world the first time. Darker and grittier, aged, but still him.
Is he practicing? In Africa? Chicago?

Is there any money left? Did he and Kem make it? I suspect that's a romantic partner from After I Stop Watching Your. Was there a kid? Did he ever slip?

How he's framed the last 15 years would be interesting to a lot of people. What he feels about it all today would be equally so.

I don't think I would have ever liked this idea before now, but there are things I want to say that need to be said, and I keep hearing them in his voice.

And so this is Noah Wiley to John Wells, the original ER writer. Yes.
Well,

originally

wrote. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We must credit Michael Crichton. Michael Crichton, in some ways, is responsible for search engine.
But,

okay, so on the one hand, she's got them a little dead to rights because clearly this started out as an ER reboot.

On the other hand, as someone who watched the pit and really enjoyed it, there's a lot of stuff in that pitch that's gone.

Like, I don't know who the person from ER is because they don't use that backstory. Like, they gave him a new backstory and basically it's the same character with a different name.
It's close. Yeah.

Yeah.

Nick reached out to both the people in this email thread, Noah Wiley and John Wells, for comment. They both declined.

But while they didn't want to talk, presumably because of ongoing litigation, their emails tell a story of their own.

After that internal email describing the gritty ER reboot, John Wells, former ER showrunner, wrote an email of his own directly to Michael Crichton's widow describing his vision for how the story would look on screen.

So this is an email that says from John Wells to

Sherry Crichton

from February 2023.

He says to her, so what was the idea that made me think that we should revisit Chicago Memorial 15 years later? Oh, no. A 12-hour shift, an hour, an episode that spills over into a 14-hour shift.

Michael's original screenplay, Our Pilot Episode, was a day in the life of the ER and Mark Green. Oops.

30 years later, it was to be a 14-hour shift for John Carter, Noah Wiley, now the attending physician in the ER.

The idea was to show the continuing collapse of public hospital emergency room care as chronic homelessness, fentanyl, and the aftermath of the pandemic have eroded the public health system.

We could see Carter arrive for the beginning of his shift.

I can almost see it. He's got the AirPods in, he's listening to music.

Follow him through the 14 hours of his day, considering whether he can keep doing this work and watch him regain his purpose and recommit to his profession.

That sounds a lot like the show that I watched. It does sound a lot like the show.

And so

after reading these emails,

I had to, as a few of your listeners might say, update my priors.

I'm not saying that Sherry Crichton should win or Warner Brothers should win, but I'm saying after reading these emails, I understood why Sherry Crichton felt that they'd kind of gone around her to make the show.

Yeah, generally speaking, if you're going to ask somebody for something,

you should probably be ready, if they say no, not to take it anyway. And I'm sure they feel that they adjusted the story enough that it's okay.

But I understand why she would feel like that's not the case. Right.
I think, and this is my opinion, not an informed legal opinion, but just my opinion as someone who's read all the documents.

I think that if the people had made the pit and called it the pit without ever talking to Sherry Crichton, that they wouldn't be in court and we wouldn't be sitting here talking about it.

What Nick's saying is not that the estate is necessarily right. He's saying those emails mean the estate has a viable legal case.

Nick is a reporter for the New York Times, as well as a careful person by temperament. So he's not going to render his personal verdict here, assuming he has one.

But I'm a a podcaster and much more risk tolerant, so I'll give you mine.

I don't know what Michael Crichton would have wanted. Most people enjoy getting lots of credit and money for their ideas.

But hearing the story of his career, what strikes me is that he was a deeply inspired person.

The stories he told may have had roots in other stories, all the hospital dramas that preceded ER, the dinosaur stories that preceded Drasig Park.

But when Crichton told his versions, they had more power. He could tell a story that made people all over the world listen in a way that is exceptionally rare.

And he got paid for that a lot, as he should have.

But the idea that now that he's gone, his estate should be able to stop other people from telling stories that are inspired by ER, but not, in my view, adapted from ER, I just don't agree with that.

I think that logic belongs to the world of lawyers, not the world of storytellers. If you tell stories, you'll steal and you'll be stolen from.

It'll bug you, but if you're really good at what you do, it won't matter much. Michael Crichton was very good at what he did.
So are the people who made the pit. What will shake out in court, though?

That's a different matter.

So, what's the most likely, like, I know how much you love making predictions, particularly if recorded in public, but like, what's the likely outcome of where this goes?

Well,

I think

the next step is the easy part to describe, which is Warner Brothers is appealing the judge's decision.

And so if they win on appeal, then I think it's likely that they win and they get to continue making the pit and the Crichton estate is frustrated.

I think that if Warner Brothers and the creative team lose again,

they will have a pretty big incentive to settle

because

this is

a big, complicated case that sprawls in a lot of directions. I don't think any of them are directions that an entertainment company really wants them to go.

You mean it could just get very messy for them?

Well, so I was reading those emails to you. Yeah.
And nobody really wants their emails read out loud on a podcast, right?

But those were the messages that they sent to Sherry Crichton, a person who they might reasonably have expected to sue them at some point over this. Oh, if there's a bunch of discovery.

What were they saying to each other writing back and forth? Right.

It has been mooted and suggested that the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, David Zaslav, could be asked for a deposition or to sit in the witness stand. That's the kind of thing that people

try not to let their CEOs do.

More importantly, there's a big debate going on about

how much

money there is for writers or how big the pot of money is that should be shared. And in a lot of ways, it's opaque.
How do you say what

is owed to the people who made the pit out of the money that was spent on a subscription to HBO Max? That's very hard to figure out.

But if this case moved forward far enough, that's exactly the kind of thing they'd be trying to figure out because they'd be assessing damages.

And does HBO Max or does Warner Brothers Discovery, do they want other creators knowing exactly how big the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is? Certainly not. Probably not.

Nick, thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Nicholas Kulish will include a link to his story about all this in our show notes. And you should also keep an eye out for his forthcoming book about Bill Gates.

I predict it will be IP worth feuding over.

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