How Noah Wyle's ER Co-Star George Clooney Feels About The Pitt

Everyone can finally relax — George Clooney likes "The Pitt."

During an appearance on "Late Night with Seth Meyers" on June 3, Clooney — who's nominated for a Tony Award for "Good Night and Good Luck," the 2025 Broadway stage adaptation of his 2005 film about Edward R. Murrow — Clooney, while discussing both his time on "ER" and the strangely named sitcom that preceded it, "E/R," brought up his colleague and friend Noah Wyle's hit HBO Max series "The Pitt." (Wyle, Julianna Marguiles, and Anthony Edwards, all of whom were original cast members on "ER," attended the premiere of Clooney's Broadway show.)

"Have you guys seen that show?" Clooney asked the audience, who cheered with approval. "It's so good, and you know, I have to say, we've been really dear friends since the show, since we did the pilot of the show," he added warmly, speaking about Wyle. "He is just the most honorable, talented young man, I get to say, because I'm an old man. And I cannot be happier for his success on this show. The show is just a beautiful show, and he does just a great job with it."

"And he's doing the thing you've outgrown, which is, he's going to go back and do all those medical terms all over again," Meyers playfully pointed out before Clooney revealed that Wyle never really had any difficulty with the medical jargon on "ER," where the actor played Dr. John Carter (and Clooney played one of his superiors, Dr. Doug Ross). "But he never had trouble," Clooney recalled. "He always could do it, I hated him for that. People should hate Noah." (Classic Clooney.)

"I think we all should," Meyers escalated before the two moved on to a different subject. So, what was the deal with Drs. Carter and Ross on "ER?"

Both George Clooney and Noah Wyle appear in the very first episode of "ER," which began airing in 1994 on NBC and became one of the gold standards in medical dramas from that point forward. Clooney's character, Dr. Doug Ross, is a pediatric fellow at the start of the series and eventually becomes an attending in that concentration within the emergency department. As for Wyle's Dr. John Carter, he's only a third-year medical student when he first shows up, as opposed to a full-fledged doctor. After matriculating, though, he ascends to being a resident at the show's fictional Cook County Hospital and ultimately becomes an attending in emergency medicine (though he dabbles briefly in surgery and abandons it pretty quickly early in his residency).

Carter and Ross are, for the most part, friendly colleagues and even good friends at various points throughout "ER." Indeed, Carter sometimes crashes at Ross' apartment, and even though they experience a brief schism in their friendship over a girl in season 2 (Christine Elise's Harper Tracy, who cheats on Carter with Ross), they're on good terms when Ross (and Clooney along with him) leaves Chicago in season 5 of the series.

Later, in the 15th and final season of "ER," Carter finds himself in need of a kidney transplant — in season 6 of the show, he's stabbed by a patient experiencing a mental breakdown, which causes lifelong kidney damage — and when he receives the kidney, he has no idea that Ross and his now-wife, Carol Hathaway (Julianna Marguiles), helped procure the organ for transplant. Even in the show's last season, in which neither Clooney nor Wyle work as a series regular or even a recurring character, the bond between the two feels unshakable.

George Clooney is right — "The Pitt" is genuinely excellent, and after word-of-mouth helped season 1 become a bonafide sensation across its 15 "real-time" episodes, fans are clamoring for season 2. (It's already been confirmed, and HBO's head of content Casey Bloys has all but promised that we'll see it in January 2026, a year after "The Pitt" premiered.) During a panel attended by People Magazine about the show's runaway success, Wyle — who stars as Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch" and works as an executive producer alongside showrunner R. Scott Gemmill and director John Wells, both of whom also worked on "ER") — said that while he's a little nervous about the high expectations, he's confident the show can rise to meet them.

Wyle specifically said that, when it comes to the praise for "The Pitt," he feels like the series needs to shut it all out and just get the work done. "You have to almost have it be a non-factor and create the same sense of privacy and same sense of hermetic sealed off, insulated sense of company that we built the first year," Wyle mused. "I think if we're successful in that regard, then the storytelling will just roll out." He continued:

"It was a combination of a lot of background, foreground, crew and cast, hungry to work, hungry to work in a way that they could really sink their teeth into and feel a sense of a purpose with. And that had an exponential effect where everybody came wanting to do even better the next day. So, one plus one equaled three every day, and it made it a pleasure to be there. That is lightning in a bottle. That's something you can't plan for, you can only pray for, and it works. And I think with this collective group, we could make it happen again, overjoyed that we get to."

Wyle certainly has a high bar to meet, but he's right — the cast and crew of "The Pitt" are simply phenomenal, and as long as they continue this show, it'll probably be at least pretty good, if not outright great. Hopefully, Wyle still enjoyed hearing about Clooney's take on the series.

"The Pitt" is streaming on HBO Max now.