“Did you watch a lot of Grey’s Anatomy growing up?” It’s a question asked in the second episode of Pulse, a new medical drama now streaming on Netflix, by Willa Fitzgerald’s Dr. Danny Simms, a waifish blonde not unlike Ellen Pompeo’s Meredith Grey. Her fellow physician Camila (Daniela Nieves) confirms that she has. “Okay,” Danny replies. “Try to unlearn that.”
The show could stand to take its own medicine. Created by Zoe Robyn, an alum of network procedurals like Hawaii Five-0 and The Equalizer, and executive produced by Lost’s Carlton Cuse, Pulse is Netflix’s first English-language medical procedural—and a blatant attempt to lure in kids who grew up on Grey’s Anatomy, which is now in its 21st season. Rain-soaked Seattle has been traded for sunny Miami. A moody soundtrack of songs by the Fray and Snow Patrol gets swapped for Top 40 hits like Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” and Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” But both shows revolve around a group of diverse, ambitious medical professionals who navigate life and love while also performing radical procedures at a moment’s notice.
Pulse knows it will draw comparisons to Grey’s Anatomy, and makes a few attempts to subvert those expectations. Grey’s famously kicks off with surgical intern Meredith Grey sleeping with a man she’ll only later learn is neurosurgery chief Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey). Their romance is frowned upon, but rendered sexy good fun. The new series, though, begins with Danny making an HR complaint after getting involved in a power-imbalanced relationship with her own chief resident. The male doctor, Xander (Colin Woodell), is temporarily suspended; Danny, meanwhile, is promoted. Flashbacks gradually reveal that their relationship is more complicated than any disclosure form could capture.
A tortured inter-hospital love affair isn’t Danny’s only parallel to Meredith Grey. She also has a tragic backstory that gets dredged up in the workplace, thanks to the presence of her sister Harper (Jessy Yates)—who is also conveniently a doctor at Maguire. Like Meredith’s little sister Lexi (Chyler Leigh), Harper is sympathetic toward their neglectful father. Danny blames herself for the accident that left Harper in a wheelchair, leading to some tortured lines like this: “You want to suffer more than the people you hurt because maybe if you do, they’ll forgive you.”
Like Grey’s, Pulse loves a catastrophic event. Season one kicks off with a hurricane that forces the hospital into lockdown, and ends with a late-breaking confession from a doctor whose unforced error killed a patient. (Does Richard Webber leaving a surgical towel in a body cavity remain the most egregious mistake in hospital-show history?) Searching for a severed body part, slicing in the dark when the hospital loses power, removing a strange foreign object from a patient’s rectum—they’re all plot points you can find on both Pulse and Grey’s, as well as any number of other medical dramas.
It’s tough to make one of these shows feel purely original; just ask the team behind Max’s hit The Pitt, who are being sued by the estate of E.R. creator Michael Crichton, which alleges that the series is an unauthorized reboot of E.R. The creators of The Pitt deny that accusation. (The Pitt, which has been renewed for a second season, reteams E.R. producers R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells with E.R. star Noah Wyle.) But while similar storylines can be blamed on genre conventions, the one-to-one relationship between Pulse’s characters and their obvious Grey’s inspirations is harder to ignore.
Like Jackson Avery (Jesse Williams), Xavier is the scion of a high-powered medical family that helps fund the hospital. Resident Sam (Jessie T. Usher) insists he’s not secretly pining for our wounded heroine, invoking the lovelorn George O’Malley (T.R. Knight). Tom (Jack Bannon) is a womanizing “hothead surgeon” who, not unlike Alex Karev (Justin Chambers), falls for one of his patients. Camilla’s good looks make her coworkers underestimate her, as happened to Izzy Stevens (Katherine Heigl). Surgical intern Sophie (Chelsea Muirhead) feels like the most distinctive character here—but there are strokes of the awkward, often belittled April Kepner (Sarah Drew) in her for those who squint. And all of these doctors answer to Justina Machado’s Natalie Cruz, the warmly commanding chair of surgery and emergency medicine who brings to mind Chandra Wilson’s Miranda Bailey.
The most egregious copy-and-paste of all arrives in the show’s seventh episode. Danny worries that she’ll only be named chief resident because of her romantic involvement with Xavier. In response, senior ER nurse Cass (Jessica Rothe) tries to boost her confidence: “You feel like he’s shining some kind of light on you, but he’s not. You are the light.” Rest assured, her speech doesn’t pack the emotional punch of Sandra Oh’s Cristina Yang telling Meredith not to allow Derek to overshadow her: “Don’t let what he wants eclipse what you need. He’s very dreamy. But he is not the sun. You are.”
Suffice it to say, Pulse feels as if an AI bot was asked to watch all 400-plus episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, then spit out a show that mimics its core beats. And why not commission an algorithm-friendly original for Netflix, where just a few years ago, 200,000 users were watching the Grey’s pilot each month? As that very episode of television turns 20 years old, Grey’s Anatomy is still relevant, both in the news and as a continued streaming hit. If anything, Pulse’s pale imitation highlights just how lightning-in-a-bottle the original show is and was.
Last year, Grey’s creator Shonda Rhimes, whose newer work like Bridgerton and Inventing Anna also lives on Netflix, balked at the idea that studios could intentionally replicate her first show’s success. At the same time, she invited them to try. “Because what I think they’re talking about is something eminently watchable and that will last forever,” she told The Hollywood Reporter, “but how are you supposed to know that when you make a show? And it also makes it sound like they should be imitative of Grey’s Anatomy. ABC did that a whole bunch, and it never worked. So, have at it!” Evidently, Netflix accepted the challenge—leaving it up for viewers to determine the resulting show’s prognosis.
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