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From Sony Music Entertainment and Campsite Media, this is Infamous.
I'm Natalie Robomed.
So today we're talking about The Pit, a medical drama that was a huge hit that many of you may have watched, and the allegations that this show is actually a sequel to ER.
Another medical drama that was big in the 90s a little while ago.
Now the estate behind ER is suing the Pitts creators and Starr.
And while this may sound like a boring intellectual property drama, there is so much more to it than that.
I mean, for one, hits are way harder to come by in Hollywood.
And this is a hit, so everyone wants a part in its success.
And it's a big family drama.
I mean there's an ambitious widow, a disputed estate, allegations of copying and millions of dollars at stake.
This could be made into a Knives Out movie in and of itself.
So today we're talking to Nick Coolish, a New York Times correspondent who has covered the debate about the pit endlessly.
All right, I'm going to throw it over to Vanessa.
Hey, Nick, how are you doing?
Great.
Good to be here, Vanessa.
How are you?
I'm very well.
Thank you so much for coming.
So The Pit, you broke an enormous amount of news on this.
The Pit, of course, ran, I believe, last year on HBO and or this year.
I think it's this year.
It's been a long year.
Yes, it's been a long year.
I mean, it's.
It's an incredible TV show, I have to say, as somebody who doesn't watch a ton of TV.
But did you know love George Clooney and Noah Wiley on ER back when I was a wee lass and my mom would watch that?
I started watching this and I think over the course of the week I watched the full, like 14 or 15 hours.
Totally.
It's just, it draws you in.
It's gross.
You see a lot of people's bodies being opened with scalpels.
Like, you can't be...
But the way that it unfolds, it is so masterful.
It's coming back for a second season in January.
So, humongous hit.
Tell us what it's about.
Well, The Pit is a show about an emergency room in the city of Pittsburgh, hence The Pit.
And it follows...
About 14 hours, I would say.
It's one shift at the ER.
Pupils, four millimeters and reactive.
Okay, that's encouraging.
What do you want for meds?
120 ketamine, 80 of rock.
A-fib on a monitor.
Morrison's clear.
That's a lot more blood than expected.
Like one long shift that kind of starts out as a normal day and then slowly more and more things happen.
It becomes more exciting and fatal.
Definitely very fatal.
Yes, many people die.
Yeah.
And so it feels very exciting because of this real-time thing.
You kind of bounce from one room where somebody's fallen into a swimming pool and drowned.
And the next room, there's a gunshot wound victim.
And then beside them is a child who's accidentally ingested drugs.
And so it's like, And you keep checking in on them.
And so there's this inherent tension that doesn't wrap up at the end of each episode, like in a traditional drama.
Right.
It's cool.
The fact that it draws you in to not only the stories of the patients, which are obviously, you know this is drama, right.
It's a gunshot wound.
It's, you know, dying of a cancer that you didn't know you had.
I mean, this is the stuff of Chekhov.
Yeah.
But also draws you into the doctors and their own psychological torment for working there.
Yeah.
I mean, interestingly, I have a friend who is now an ER doctor. and also has a lot of ADD.
And now I sort of watching this, I'm like, oh, I get it.
This is a job for people with ADD because there's always something different happening.
And you just have to be self-propelled by a motor you know to be successful, like be smart in the moment, but you don't need to focus over time.
But I asked her, what do you think of The Pit?
And she said, it is the show that really shows what it's like to work there.
Other than the fact that I wouldn't give my intern's this much autonomy to like do surgery on people.
It really shows it.
Yeah, the interns sort of go from like dropping the scalpel in episode one to like performing complicated like heart surgeries.
So that's one thing that's less realistic.
Which is just six hours because each episode is an hour in the show.
So I had no idea, before I read your story, which you wrote in the New York Times, about the story behind the story, which is, you know, Noah Wiley, who is mostly known for playing John Carter, who was the character on ER, who was the intern right.
He was the guy who had just started this day.
And they're like, you need to go put some sutures in this woman.
And he's like, whoa, what is that about?
Thank you, doctor.
You're very welcome.
When do I come to have my stitches up?
Oh, three weeks.
When my son had stitches in his foot, they said 10 days.
Really?
Well, 10 days, three weeks, any time in there.
Okay.
He stays for every season of ER, which is like 11 seasons.
He becomes a really important part of the show.
He's obviously totally dedicated to it, but this is a long time ago.
This is like the 90s.
Yeah.
He comes up with an idea to do a spinoff of ER, which is what becomes The Pit.
Of course I also didn't know that ER was written by Michael Crichton, who's a huge bestselling author.
So tell us about all of that and how Noah Wiley and Michael Crichton start having this drama that we're going to discuss in this episode.
Yeah.
I mean, we all know about these doctors and lawyers who write these bestselling books, the way that Scott Turow and John Grisham were lawyers and Michael Crichton was a doctor.
And they kind of use their expertise to write these thrillers that have more knowledge, more science, more technical detail than you might expect from the average writer just trying to hack it out.
Yeah.
And he wrote, I mean, Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park.
He wrote The Andromeda Strain.
I mean, really a lot of stuff that got turned into movies.
Huge mega.
I mean, sold so, so many books.
I mean, you know, Rising Sun.
He also wrote and directed movies.
He wrote and directed Westworld, the original.
So crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I mean but the script that became ER, the script that became the ER pilot was is, I mean, probably like the closest, the most autobiographical thing that he ever wrote.
It was like a roughly two-hour story of like a day in the life in a hospital.
And there's a character that's based on him, which much later becomes, you know, the Noah Wiley character.
So the Noah Wiley character in many ways, you know, is Michael Crichton.
Right, okay.
At the start.
He doesn't go off and write bestsellers.
He stays at the hospital and keeps working.
So it's kind of like multiverses.
They branch off from each other.
Right, right, right.
Have you read that original pilot?
Uh, i've read a lot of a lot of it.
Yeah, like i have a copy of it and it's it's very similar to the original, to the pilot itself, which is streaming, which i went back and watched, and it really plays like a movie.
But basically what happens is michael creighton writes this you know 180 page movie that's based on you know him being an intern, and then they decide to make a, a tv show out of it.
This little known guy in Hollywood named Steven Spielberg, who apparently is okay at this stuff says hey, you know what.
This isn't a movie.
This is the beginning of a TV show that will reintroduce the world to the hospital genre.
And so Steven Spielberg's production company, along with him and some other folks, get together and make this.
And we should say this was the show that made a star out of George Clooney.
Like, I think some of our younger listeners might not remember ER.
I remember I'm a little young for it, not to brag.
But I do remember watching this, like, with my mom.
And, you know, it takes place at this hospital in Chicago.
But George Clooney is the hot doctor in it.
He's the McDreamy of his time, I guess.
He is so dreamy.
And it really is true.
I mean, I forgot also that the pilot opens up with he's, like, drunk.
Yeah.
And he's just like, give me an IV.
Yeah, you know, so I can pop back up and then party tomorrow night, you know.
But Crichton himself is sort of dreamy also.
I mean, he's like six, nine.
He's this charismatic guy.
He's, you know, the hottest writer in Hollywood and in books.
I mean his books have sold 250 million copies, which I mean he must be one of.
You know, it's like him and JK.
Rowling, right?
Like, That is crazy.
So, I mean, originally ER really is his baby.
Like it's Crichton, and then there's a showrunner, John Wells, and they're running this thing.
That's going for many years.
And Noah Wiley is just an actor on it, really.
He's a very important actor.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the people, you know, this I think comes up a little later in it too.
I think the people who worked on ER for more than a decade were Actually sort of felt like Michael Crichton wrote this one script and then walked off into the sunset and started and collected paychecks over and over and over again.
Paychecks like I want to be clear that you have in your piece that Michael Crichton made 800000 per episode in.
Just in back end?
Just in back end.
So it's like, what, 20 episodes for 11 seasons or something like that?
Well, the number's in there.
It's a quarter of a billion dollars?
What is it?
No, no, seriously.
I mean, And if you got that for just writing one script, that first original 180-page script, What's his per word rate?
Vanessa, former magazine writer.
It's a million dollars a word.
That used to be so good.
Yay!
And again, that's only the back – that's the back end.
He got something up front.
But so that's the thing.
I think there is a residual resentment that you see later in the court case a little bit, where they're like you know you got paid pretty fairly for that one script that you did would be, I think, the view of the side of the people who made the pit.
Whereas sort of like this started as his story.
Like this is his character.
This isn't just –
Like Jurassic Park, like he's not a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
He's not a paleontologist.
Like this was his, you know, was sort of his life.
His memoir in a way.
Yeah.
And people feel more personally about that.
Right.
But, as you say, like John Wells, the showrunner, who worked on 11 seasons of ER, he basically hooks up with Noah Wiley, who is just an actor.
Just an actor on the show.
But Noah Wiley has an idea.
So like what's Noah Wiley's idea?
That he comes up with what like maybe five years ago and he talks to John Wells about it.
So a lot changes between the time that ER first comes out and now.
And the big thing that's changed is the letters IP.
Intellectual property.
Intellectual property.
We didn't used to talk about IP the way we did now, casually with our mothers and grandmothers around the dinner table at Thanksgiving.
It was just like, oh, I wrote this book, or I wrote this movie, or I made this movie.
It wasn't like, who has the IP?
But so everything's supposed to be a reboot of something or a new version of something else.
Like everything from Westworld.
Including Westworld.
Now, of course, went on HBO like 10 years ago or something.
Michael Crichton wrote Twister with his ex-wife and Twister's, you know, making money.
Oh my God, did Twister?
Yeah, he's everywhere.
He's absolutely everywhere.
And so for Noah Wiley, I think that he certainly wasn't at the peak of his career in February 2020.
And no one would argue that his biggest character ever wasn't Dr. John Carter.
And so I think he had an instinct that a lot of actors would have, which is hey, you know what would be great is another version of my biggest show ever.
Starring me as my biggest character ever.
So and it's a character study.
It's like Joker, right?
He goes, yeah, he writes to John Wells, who had been the showrunner.
He said he proposes a character study in the vein of Logan beating Wolverine Picard, like from Star Trek and Joker.
And he talks about how it's going to be.
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.
So it's like he has this vision.
Oh, and then I love that he goes.
Let's quote get a few band members together and write a beautiful new song in an old, familiar key.
It's so slick.
It's just too much.
Yeah.
Such an actor.
You can tell.
This is the kind of email where you can totally tell it was like, meant to sound casual and labored over for weeks.
Right.
Definitely.
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So he basically gets together the band, but he leaves out one important person, who is Michael Crichton, who at this point is indeed no longer with us.
He is dead.
But he has been married five times.
And his last wife, Sharia Alexander, who was on As the World Turns.
She was married to him only for a couple of years.
He died very suddenly.
And she actually was pregnant with his baby and the baby was not in his will.
So that was like a thing that had to be resolved.
She's got a prenup, one million for nine years if they break up.
She's getting some amount of that.
But even if they stay together, that's like her whole thing.
What do you mean?
Well, so Michael Crichton's previous wife was the one that he wrote Twister with.
Okay.
And when they got divorced, it was one of those big divorces where people were like, oh my God, he's paying her tens of millions of dollars.
So I think that he was, you know, he and his lawyers were like very clear and careful.
Yeah.
So it was even say just this, was just like you'll get this, which is a perfectly great amount of money that people can live on for the rest of their lives.
But like, it's not going to be OK, what happened last time?
OK, so basically he dies and that is all she is able to get.
Like, that's it.
Yeah.
I mean, the way that I look at it is that she was kind of forced from the very beginning to defend her rights and her son's rights financially because, because she is pregnant and
The way his will is written.
It really jumps out at me.
But I'm told by lawyers that it's actually kind of standard.
It's like only the people in this will know other people you know, so that if the illegitimate child in North Dakota you know comes out of the woodwork, they can't, you know, lay a claim to it.
But so basically she is pregnant.
They have not added the child to his will because they really are not expecting him to die.
Yeah.
I mean, he has he has cancer.
But, as it was explained to me, it was not something where they were expecting anything to kind of happen so quickly.
And so she immediately like has to sue her own husband's estate to have her son added, which she does successfully.
So her son becomes an heir.
She's not this woman who's received a billion dollars and, just you know, sits poolside, you know, eating melon balls.
This is a woman who has had to like keep an eye out, you know, be sharp, be aware, be ready and not let herself or her son get you know Right.
She's married.
She's pregnant.
She's obviously not excited that her husband has suddenly died and she has to sue.
This is a tragedy for her.
And in all of this posthumous situation, she becomes the CEO of Crichton Sun, which is a TV production company, and also his archive.
Right.
So she's now entrusted with.
How do I uphold my responsibility to my husband and make sure that he gets his due?
She becomes very upset when she learns that there is going to be an ER spinoff with Noah Wiley, the original showrunner, and have nothing to do with Crichton, because they literally just on Thanksgiving Eve, call her to say, like yo, there's going to be a story in Deadline, which is a trade publication for Hollywood, announcing that we're going to do this.
Just wanted to give you a heads up.
Totally.
Right.
And she pulls out you know the old contracts, the ER contracts and goes well, wait a second, because I'm completely protected here.
He has to be consulted for any sequel.
And even beyond that, I think he gets a piece of it, right?
Yeah.
Michael Crichton had something in the ER contract that's called a frozen rights provision.
And it really specifically says you can't do a sequel or spinoff without Michael Crichton say so, without Steven Spielberg say so.
The people who created ER are the creators and they can veto the spinoffs.
I mean, you got to realize this is like a document from 1993.
Right.
I'm not even sure that the people who were putting this show together had looked at the document from 1993 and knew that they had this right.
Although the right is, you know, now the subject of fierce litigation, right?
But so, yeah, she says, hold on, hold on.
You can't make this without the Crichton estate, aka me, Sherry Crichton.
And so, you know, they start negotiating.
Right.
And they do not come to a deal.
Right.
They start negotiating.
And really, there's almost no price, right, that she's willing to.
It seems to me from your story like there's almost no price that she's willing to settle for.
You know, I'm not sure that's true.
I mean, there's so many issues in this story, which is part of what makes it interesting.
And like one of them is.
Are the big television studios making less money from streaming than they did from broadcast?
Okay.
Because the studios always want to say, oh, I'm such an impoverished Warner Brothers television.
I couldn't possibly pay the writers or the actors or the directors, you know.
Yeah.
And I think that the truth lies somewhere in between.
Like you're not having multi-billion dollar juggernauts like ER, which I have watched in – I think I've watched episodes of ER in like Egypt and Romania, you know, on little televisions and hotels.
I mean the global phenomenon.
But on the other hand I don't think anybody quite believes that the studios are as poor as they say they are.
But so the studio would say Sherry is expecting ER money for a limited –
HBO Max series, and Sherry would say, they have the money, they just don't want to pay me.
Right, right, right.
And what's kind of amazing is that it seems like this gets tangled up with David Zaslav, who's the head of Warner Brothers, and he wants to make a big announcement about all these new great shows he has coming out.
And because Sherry is sort of dithering, he doesn't get to make his big announcement.
And then he's sort of just like, you know, OK, we're done.
We're done.
There's no ER spinoff.
You guys are over.
Right.
So they were going to do the big splashy rebrand, Max.
And they wanted to be like at the end, like at Steve Jobs' iPhone announcement, they were going to do just one more thing.
And they were going to start with the da-dun, like the VR sound.
And then they'll have the face of Clooney, who's going to, of course, appear like in a little cameo.
Yeah.
And so this is the idea.
And I've actually talked to reporters who covered the Max announcement and who said yeah, This answers a question in my mind because it seemed very anticlimactic.
Like the reporters covering it were also expecting a big splashy announcement.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So not coming to terms for that.
Like definitely did not work.
Did not put Sherry Crichton in the good graces of Warner Brothers?
Right.
But then they just go ahead and make it anyway and call it The Pit.
I mean, that is essentially what happened.
They say this is no longer an ER spinoff.
We've changed Noah Wiley's name.
He's not Josh Carter, John whatever from the original.
He's now got a different name.
We're going to Pittsburgh.
We're changing up a bunch of different things.
And we're going to really focus on how this is about what happened in years after COVID and put in this plot line of you know that his mentor had died during COVID and he's so traumatized by it.
And that's that.
And we've sold it to HBO.
I mean, the way that I always look at it is that this show called The Pit comes out and Sherry Crichton sues and says you owe me money because my husband wrote the pilot for ER.
And then everyone goes, ugh.
Does every hospital show in the world belong to Sherry Crichton?
Like, who does she think she is?
Why does she?
This is this.
Excuse me.
The show's not called ER.
It's called The Pit.
You know, the character's named Rabinovich.
It's totally different.
And that I mean, and that I think that was my reaction.
Honestly, like the first time I saw something about the lawsuit I was like oh, come on.
Like this is ridiculous.
And then you go into the court file and you see that the show that they pitched Sherry Crichton as the ER spinoff is real time every hour.
No, I mean when they were trying to get sherry on board with this proposed sequel that she found out about after the fact.
John wells, who was the the er showrunner, who was also going to be attached to the pit, sent sherry carton a nice email where he basically said okay, this is what it's going to be.
It's going to be a 12-hour shift, an hour an episode that spills over into a 14-hour pilot.
And 30 years later, you know it's going to be a 14-hour shift for john carter, Noah Wiley, now the attending physician in the ER, which does sound awfully familiar.
Yeah, I would just push back on it.
I think they're actually pretty similar.
When I watched ER, I was like, this is...
I agree with you.
It's way slower.
You know, I mean, the pit is so fast that you're like almost getting whiplash.
Like you're just like, I can't.
But when you think about the like dramaturgical components, they're pretty similar, right?
Like the doctors, they're running around.
The plot of the show gets revealed through.
You know these scenes and these sort of interstitial moments that doctors are having with each other after like We got to save this person.
I mean, the amount of gore that's shown, I think, in both cases is sort of surprising.
Right.
And so I don't know.
I feel like they're going to lose this.
I feel like they're going to lose this.
And yet they're coming out with a second season.
So it's obviously lucrative enough and high profile enough that they've just decided, like we're going to, we're going to pay if we lose.
Yeah.
They bang those episodes out.
It's like it's pretty quick.
This is like a model of like a profitable kind of show.
If you can go back to making hospital shows and police procedurals where you just shoot on the streets of New York.
Sure.
Yeah.
That that's like really that's really good for them.
You know, I mean, I think both sides go into litigation thinking they're going to win.
It probably comes out with some kind of settlement.
I mean, I guess what I would say is that if this litigation was happening to a show that was on the bubble where they were, like you know, maybe we're going to renew it.
Maybe we're not going to renew it for a second season.
They would be like, no, we are not renewing that.
Right.
Well, to go back a step, Sherry Creighton and her lawyers tried to stop the pit.
Oh, they did try to stop it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They tried to stop it.
They did not win on that.
So the show came out, and it was really the show of Noah Wiley's dreams.
When Noah Wiley wrote that email you know, he never Well, he probably imagined, but he probably dared not speak out loud.
Like, he won the Emmy Award that he was nominated for multiple times on ER and never won.
Thank you to everybody at HBO Max and to Warner Brothers Television for allowing the conditions to exist for lightning to strike in my life twice.
I mean, who...
Who gets to do that?
Yeah, like who actually comes back and does the thing again and it actually goes better than the first time.
And it was a big hit and it grew into a hit too.
A lot of people like me, I actually saw it and I thought it was an ER reboot and I thought, ugh.
I don't want to watch that.
And then I started watching it.
And actually the things I liked about it were the things that were different from ER.
And I kept watching.
And I think I watched it in May.
So it was like this slow burn where people, you know kids, who had never seen ER, all these people just slowly discovered it for themselves.
And it grew into this like big hit in a way that I don't think anybody actually quite expected.
Yeah.
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I just want to go back to like Shari's not going to really actually see any of this money, necessarily personally or her son.
Do you believe when she says, I'm doing this?
Her son will get the money.
Oh, her son will get the money.
Yeah, her son gets the money.
So that's, I mean, yeah, yeah.
Okay, well, then that's a whole different story.
I thought that she was going to – it was just going to go to his original family.
No, no.
Because she says she's doing it just to –
You know, in this time of AI and pressure on Hollywood, she's just trying to stand up for a content creator that doesn't have the resources to actually fight back in court.
Right, I mean there have been some famous cases in the past about the people who made Superman originally for DC Comics.
There's all these cases of who actually gets the money, and it always seems to gravitate toward big corporations and away from the little cobblers in the corner.
Right, the cobblers who came up with it.
But so, I mean, I think, though, it's the opposite.
I think that and this is just my personal opinion but I think that the studio was seeing her work too much through the lens of like oh, the widow wants money and didn't realize like this woman like is still in love with her husband and thinks his name should ring out through the centuries, like he is, you know, and like, and so for her like, i think there really is like like a passion and a feeling behind this and they're sort of oh, maybe give her a little money and she'll go away, and it's like i don't think that's actually.
You know, and she has so much money when jurassic world makes, you know, 850 million at the box office, you know she gets many, many years of lawyers fees out of it.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think you're right.
I think that's what's fascinating about it is that, like the misunderstanding on each end and also on the like Noah Wiley and that showrunner who we mentioned Wells a couple of times his perspective that comes out in what you reviewed is like look, you made you know the quarter billion dollars on ER Michael Crichton from writing this pilot plus like a little couple notes here and there.
And I, you know, this was my job every single day for 11 years.
And I'm not faulting you, but like, that's the deal I made.
But like Why would you stand in the way of me and Noah doing this creative, exciting project that's based on something that we devoted our lives?
Like the sum of our lives is based on that original ER series anyway.
So like the fact that we're able to make this, we all know how it works in Hollywood.
Like the fact that they're able to actually get the deal to make this spinoff is incredible.
The fact that they have this opportunity.
If she really cared about creators, like why would she stay, you know?
And, you know, you can see that perspective as well.
Totally.
I mean, and I think there's also this question of there has to be a certain number of things that could be changed, at which point it's a different show.
So, like, how many things are they?
Because you have people like David E. Kelly, you know, who make legal shows all the time.
And you have actors who appear as doctors in multiple shows like Omar Epps' House and Grey's Anatomy, I think.
And you have David Caruso, who's in NYPD Blue and CSI.
So you can't say, Noah Wiley, you can't play a doctor again.
Right, yeah.
And you can't say...
John Wells, you can't make a hospital show again.
Right, but it goes back to the IP, right?
So it's like the idea of there's Batman, whoever came up with Batman, whoever well Mean Girls interestingly has a suit like that with somebody we know.
And And we have covered that in Infamous.
If anybody would like to go back and listen to our Mean Girls episode, we will have a link in the show notes.
So you can hear about the person that Mean Girls was based on and her sister, who wrote the book that it was based on, and how there was sort of a dispute with Tina Fey about who really came up with what there as well.
Yeah.
Point being when you have something like Five Nights at Freddy's, which my kids loved, we're not going to see a Five Nights at Freddy's movie over and over every two years for the next 10 years.
When something works in Hollywood, there's got to be a sequel, a prequel.
There's a better call Saul for Breaking Bad, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The world is noisy and to get heard. this is the best way to get heard.
And people think, well, if they liked it the first time, they might like it the second time.
But the thing about this one is they didn't call it ER2.
You know, they didn't say from the mind of Michael Crichton.
So it's like they didn't get the benefits of calling it the sequel.
Right, that is true.
Yeah.
And so that's a question.
How much are you paying the person for the idea?
And how much are you paying the person to use their name and the name of their show that was a hit?
That's interesting.
But you can't copyright the name of a show.
Right.
No, that's true.
So they actually could have called, but that probably would have been a little too close.
But no, I mean, and part of the thing, I don't actually like a story where it's obviously one thing.
Right.
Like that's not like that's not a story.
And you also don't usually get a fight where it's really clear that one side is wrong and one side is right.
Because in that case, you get, oh, sorry, my bad.
That's the whole story.
Yeah.
You're talking about your this whole story.
This whole story.
In total is is that kind of thing.
I could sit down and maybe this means I should have gone to law school but I could sit down and construct an entire case for John Wells.
And Scott Gemmel and Noah Wiley essentially the team behind The Pit and say they created this show, set in 2025, about what it's like to work in a hospital today.
And they deserve to be able to make their show.
And I can sit down and I can make a case for Sherry Crichton saying they came to her.
She had the rights.
She didn't make a deal with them.
And then they went around her.
They even prepared a press release.
You know, before this Max announcement with David Zaslav where it says Noah Wiley will reprise his iconic role in a straight to series order to ER sequel.
You know, and like I've seen this like actual version four of the press release, that was ready.
You know that was ready to go.
So crazy.
Yeah.
But you know like, on the flip side, the guy who I think probably has the most behind the scenes control over the show is this guy named Scott Gemmel.
And when I read his comments I actually get the sense that he was glad to not be making an ER reboot right.
Because, like, an ER reboot, you know, you say George Clooney comes in and smiles in an episode.
You have to, like, bring back all the characters.
And it's cheesy.
I mean, like, it's cheesy.
Yeah.
And he said in his statement to the court.
He said when I was creating the pit, I intentionally made it different than ER and every other medical drama I am aware of in as many ways possible.
My goal was to do something completely new a medical drama that had never been done before about critical issues plaguing our medical system and society at large, particularly in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And I believe that because I actually think if you're a writer, you do the ER reboot because you know you can get paid to do the ER reboot.
But I think if somebody had come to them in 2020 and said, hey.
I'll pay you the exact same amount of money to make a whole new cool show out of your imagination, or to like, go back over the thing that you did for 13 seasons.
Right.
I think I know what he would have chosen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I agree with that.
I think it is better.
But I still think that the DNA is pretty similar.
Yeah, there's two ways of looking at it.
There's the legal way and there's just the normal person eyeball test thing.
And what they're duking out in court is the legal question of whether this is an ER reboot.
But the sort of average person – and maybe this explains why they might not want to put it in front of a jury – the average person is going to say I mean –
Kind of looks like you are to me.
Yeah, that's definitely true.
Yeah.
I mean, it's fascinating.
And I do have to say, like, you do hear stories like this all the time in Hollywood.
You know, you work on something and you don't get the proper credit.
Or you start working on a screenplay with someone and then they take it over and do it alone by themselves.
And it's just a matter of like whether you actually have the means or energy to pursue it, to get what you might be owed from it.
And then, like you know, as you said like, on the other hand, there's no such thing as an original idea.
And how different does a thing have to be to be a new thing?
You know, it's, it's really, really tricky stuff.
And I guess we'll just have to have to wait and see, right?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
It'll be interesting to see where it goes.
And, and whether Sherry is somebody who is not as inclined to settle as quickly as other people.
Right.
And it's, I mean, it's season two coming out, you know, in January.
People are going to watch.
It's going to be a hit again.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm going to watch.
So, yeah.
All right, everybody.
Check out Nick's story, which we will also have a link to in the show notes, if you're curious about this whole fiasco between Michael Crichton's estate and ER and the pit.
And yeah thank you so much for coming on infamous it was so much fun to be here that's it for infamous if you enjoy the show please leave us a rating and review and tell your friends if you want to follow me on instagram you can find me at natrobe that's n-a-t-r-o-b-e and if you want to support vanessa's work you can buy her book blurred lines rethinking sex power and consent on campus See you next week.
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