Lawyers for Max’s “ The Pitt ” submitted a final briefing Monday in an attempt to defeat claims that the Emmy-winning show is a knockoff of “ER.” This marks the most recent development in a lawsuit brought by “ER” creator Michael Crichton’s estate against Warner Bros. in 2024.

In a reply brief submitted Monday night, the defendants — who also include producer John Wells and actor Noah Wyle — describe the proposition that “The Pitt” is a “derivative work of the “ER” as “baseless.”

“Plaintiff seeks to kill ‘The Pitt’ — and claims it should never have aired — based on a plainly incorrect misreading of a single phrase in a 1994 contract that gave Crichton approval rights over ‘derivative works’ of ‘ER,'” the reply brief reads.

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Citing a lack of sufficient evidence, defendants’ state that “‘The Pitt’ contains no protected elements from ‘ER’: aside from sharing a genre (hospital drama) and certain unprotectable, genre-specific tropes, like the use of medical jargon, the two shows are nothing…