Yahoo Lifestyle Netflix’s Pulse Says It Doesn’t Want to Be Grey’s Anatomy — So Why Is It Like Grey’s Anatomy?
The following post contains mild spoilers for the first five episodes of Pulse, now streaming on Netflix.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve watched 21 minutes or all 21 seasons of ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy: You can sense its influence on Netflix’s new medical drama Pulse almost immediately.
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Much like Grey’s, Pulse — which dropped its 10-episode first season on Thursday — focuses on two very pretty doctors (Willa Fitzgerald’s Danny Simms and Colin Woodell’s Xander Phillips) who become romantically entangled, complicating their jobs at a local hospital. Now, Pulse‘s equivalent of Meredith Grey and Derek Shepherd starts out a little thornier than #MerDer did: When the show begins, we find that Danny has reported Phillips for sexual harassment; he’s ousted as chief resident at their Miami trauma center, and Danny replaces him. So, there aren’t any Post-it note weddings on the horizon for these two, but we later learn that Danny and Phillips had been dating for a while before she accused him of harassment, and flashbacks chronicle their initial attraction and steamy first hookups.
Elsewhere, Pulse features a Grey’s-esque ensemble of other beautiful doctors at said hospital, all of whom lug their interpersonal baggage to work despite the dangerous hurricane that’s tearing through the city. Before that storm has even passed, for example, cocky doc Tom Cole (Pennyworth‘s Jack Bannon) manages to get wrapped up in a love triangle with two female colleagues, planting kisses on them in separate wings of the hospital. In less than a day!
Pulse‘s clear overlap with Grey’s isn’t a knock against it. Soapy medical dramas are a TV mainstay, and Grey’s Anatomy‘s longevity is undeniable. (It just scored a Season 22 renewal today.) Here’s the weird part: In Episode 2, Pulse insists to its viewers that it’s not like the Shondaland staple, even though it so clearly is.
Three minutes into the show’s second episode, Danny pulls aside newbie doc Camila Perez, asking her to find a room in the hospital where the staff can sleep as they ride out the hurricane. When Camila suggests sleeping “in the on-call rooms, with the bunk beds,” Danny asks her, “Did you watch a lot of Grey’s Anatomy growing up?” Camila sunnily replies that she did, and an incredulous-looking Danny sighs, “OK. Try to unlearn that,” before walking away.
I suppose, on some level, there’s a chance the Grey’s reference was meant to be tongue-in-cheek — Pulse‘s way of saying upfront, “Yeah, we get it, this show is like that other show. Move along now!” But if that’s the intention, it doesn’t land. Danny is preparing her staff for an imminent natural disaster in this scene, so the tone’s quite serious already, and her opinion of Grey’s seems uncharitable at best. Nothing about that fleeting dialogue feels like a fun hat-tip to Pulse‘s most obvious predecessor; if anything, the show seems to be shaking viewers by the shoulders and telling them, “At this hospital, we are serious.”
The problem? They aren’t serious! Even during a city-rocking hurricane, which overwhelms the ER and knocks out its power, Pulse‘s doctors find ways to act exhaustingly unprofessional. In the season’s first half, the worst offense comes in Episode 3, when Danny and Phillips bicker about their romance while intubating a critical patient. “What do you want me to be honest about?” Danny asks her ex(-ish)-beau while their patient’s stats are quickly dropping. “The fact that we were f—king living together!” he snaps, with a dozen of their colleagues crowded around them. “Is my toothbrush in your bathroom right now? Are my T-shirts on your floor?… You went to HR because I told you I loved you, and you couldn’t take that, so you pushed me away. Because your mom walked out one night and never came back. That’s what this is. Because that’s who you are.”
Uh… guys? The patient?!
We’d have no problem with Pulse‘s overdramatic blurring of personal and professional boundaries — if the show would simply embrace its own sudsiness. Grey’s Anatomy, among other medical shows, brings its doctors’ non-work drama into the hospital constantly; just recently on Grey’s, senior doc Richard wanted to bail on handling a liver transplant because it would have meant working with Meredith, at whom he was angry in that episode. And that’s just one example in 21 seasons of doctor-on-doctor (or even doctor-on-patient) drama. We get into these shows for the frenzied emotions that the docs can never seem to leave at the door. Save for Max’s harrowing The Pitt, the fun of any memorable medical drama usually lies in these colleagues’ messy personal dynamics, while the actual medicine is an interesting footnote.
But with that single throwaway exchange about Grey’s Anatomy in Episode 2, Pulse urged us all to take it seriously, seemingly promising more in store than just a hospital-set soap opera. Instead, we got a hospital-set soap opera. And we’re cool with that! But to be truly enjoyable, Pulse needs to be cool with it, too.
Are you enjoying Pulse so far? If you’re done with Season 1, grade it in our poll below, then hit the comments with your full reviews, stat.
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