Noah Wyle is “not sorry” about playing a new doctor on The Pitt instead of reprising his role as John Carter in a now-scrapped ER revival.
After The Pitt premiered on Thursday, January 9, Wyle, 53, was asked about how plans to bring back ER ultimately turned into an entirely new show instead.
“That calls into question all the various chronologies of this and all the different sorts of iterations. You’re absolutely right, the intentionality was born in 2020 during the pandemic,” Wyle told TVLine on Thursday. “The idea was to take a look at what was happening to the people that were on the front lines, and also take a look at the population that was getting sick and dying, and seeing how there appeared to be two different health care systems in our country — those for people who have money and insurance, and those who don’t.”
The similarities between The Pitt and ER were there for a reason.
“Those were all issues we tried to talk about back in the ’90s, when 22 million Americans were going without health insurance and using emergency rooms as their primary source of health care. All of these themes were really significant to us then, and they have remained significant to us,” Wyle, who played John Carter on the long-running series, noted. “Then it just became, ‘Is the old IP [intellectual property] the easiest and most advantageous delivery system?’ It seemed to be the one that people were most excited about trying, but it wasn’t really the point of the exercise.”
Despite there being an interest in ER being revived, Wyle was more excited about doing a new take on the subject, adding, “The more we went down that road, the more the point got obscured in the reunion aspect, the retread aspect and the reboot aspect. So I was not sorry when we were sort of forced to pivot and figure out how to tell the story in a new way.”
Wyle continued: “In a lot of ways, [not reviving ER] unburdened us from narrative limitations that we would have had to adhere to, and pay homage to.”
ER, which aired from 1994 to 2009, followed the inner life of an emergency room in a fictionalized version of Chicago’s real Cook County Hospital. Wyle starred alongside George Clooney, Julianna Marguiles, Anthony Edwards, Eriq La Salle and Sherry Stringfield (and later John Stamos, Mekhi Pfifer and Linda Cardellini, among others).
More than a decade after ER ended, Wyle has returned as the star and executive producer of a new medical series on Max. The Pitt is described by the streaming service as “a realistic examination of the challenges facing healthcare workers in today’s America as seen through the lens of the frontline heroes working in a modern-day hospital in Pittsburgh.”
The Pitt highlights the highs — and lows — of the job while making the 15 episodes showcase 15 hours of one shift.
“[Fellow EP] John [Wells], Max and Warner Brothers were on board to try to make use of this new platform of streaming, to see whether or not we could tell the story in a visually more arresting way than we did back in the ’90s,” Wyle explained. “It is a more photorealistic way than we were ever able to do, and in a more organic, performance-based way. Because you’re no longer to standards and practices and language [barriers], you really can paint with all the colors on the palette. The question isn’t ‘What can you show?’ Instead it is, ‘What should you show, in discretion and taste?’”
Wyle found it “really gratifying” getting to bring a new medical drama to life.
“I wanted it to feel like what it used to feel like — and what it hadn’t felt like for a long time. Could we make it feel that way again? John and Yana Grebenyuk R. Scott [Gemmill] were on board for that because they, too, have been looking for that feeling that we all [last] had 15 years ago, when we did this the first time,” he continued. “The work felt good, and we had a good time, and we liked each other while we did it, and everybody was respectful. It was inclusive, and it was groundbreaking. And we wanted to see if lightning could strike twice — and, in some ways, it already has.”
In addition to The Pitt, Thursday also marked the premiere of Wyle’s former costar La Salle’s Prime Video series On Call. Wyle was asked about the coincidence by TVLine, to which he replied, “No [I didn’t know], but what can I say? The ’90s are back.”
New episodes of The Pitt stream Thursdays on Max.
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