What Got You Here Won’t Get You Out

No one’s coming to save you—except you

Noah Wyle never wanted to do another medical show.

The star of the ER, the show that launched the entire medical drama genre, refused to take a single medical role for fifteen years after the series ended in 2009.

“I wouldn’t take a script if it was to play a doctor, even if it was a veterinarian,” he says. “The idea of putting a stethoscope around my neck just seemed like a really bad idea.”

And then Covid happened. To quote his 2025 interview with Variety:

As the world was just starting to retreat into lockdown in 2020, Wyle began getting DMs on Instagram from first responders overwhelmed by the first lethal waves of COVID-19. Some simply 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?’” he says. “‘It’s really hard out here.’”

Wyle, meanwhile, was confronting his own pandemic-fed crisis…. “I just thought the world was coming apart. I didn’t know how to contribute anything of meaning or value anymore.”

And so The Pitt was born.