Photo: Jeff Neumann/Jeff Neumann/Netflix 2024
Pulse makes clear from its earliest shots that a critical percentage of its creative drive has been phoned in. As the Netflix medical drama begins, an oncoming hurricane causes a bus of student athletes to careen off a bridge into the ocean. The sequence looks like a poorly rendered outtake from a video game circa 2012, a bus-shaped object nose-diving into waveless water as one-dimensional storm clouds gather behind. If Pulse were more curious about who its doctors are as people (and as doctors), the crash would demonstrate how the hospital staff we’re about to meet will care for dozens of victims from a devastating accident. There is no need for the theatrics of establishing disaster footage; these patients could simply stream into the ER, freezing and terrified, allowing the doctors to react in revealing, human ways.
This is not where Pulse’s interests lie. The bus disaster is primarily a backdrop for what this show really cares about: that third-year resident Danny Simms (Willa Fitzgerald) has accused her supervisor, chief resident Xander Phillips (Colin Woodell), of sexual harassment. Xander gets put on administrative leave, and in his absence, Danny gets his job. This is immediately suspect, of course. She accuses him of harassment and then directly benefits from the accusation? Seems manipulative! Pulse then skips away from its current-day timeline to provide lengthy flashbacks of Danny and Xander’s very consensual relationship. What could have happened for this hot young couple to go from literal steamy shower scenes to an HR complaint? Is this handsome and caring male doctor truly such a monster?!
The chief effect of all this is reminding viewers of other, better medical dramas. Most nakedly, Pulse is a Grey’s Anatomy rip-off: Its doctors wear scrubs and treat patients on occasion, but mostly they have sex and get into feuds and pause to cry in stairwells. The title card is accompanied by loud breathy sounds that could be sex noises or a death rattle, take your pick. And yet, Grey’s Anatomy has been many, many things over its 20 years on television, but it has rarely been as boring, shoddily built, or openly obnoxious as Pulse can be. Even in the stretches where Grey’s falters or miscalculates some character’s arc, it has an astounding ability to claw its way back toward magnetism. Pulse has no such capacity, because Pulse has so little charm to begin with.
Grey’s Anatomy is not the only option for comparison here. It’s unfortunate for Pulse that it premieres right in the middle of Pitt-mania, and although there’s no release window during the last 20 years when Pulse would’ve looked great, this is one of the worst options available. Compared with the calm and yet urgent competence of The Pitt, Pulse’s medical professionals stroll through a hospital full of glamour lighting, moseying calmly from one trauma to the next. They appear to have endless time, even as the hospital loses power in the middle of a hurricane. Next to the carefully layered constructions of The Pitt’s medical team, the character development on Pulse is painfully empty. Sam Elijah (Jessie T. Usher), a doctor with two awkward first names, exists mostly to pine for Danny. Tom Cole (Jack Bannon) is the real asshole, which is how you know Xander’s not that bad. Daniela Nieves plays Camila Perez, the cute chipper one; Chelsea Muirhead’s Sophie Chan is her requisite opposite, the cynical one who wears less makeup. Most frustratingly, there’s also Danny’s sister Harper (Jessy Yates), a fellow resident who uses a wheelchair and would seem like a crucial, complicated element of Danny’s overall story. Harper moves in that direction eventually, but she’s mostly sidelined for the season, rarely interacting with anyone other than Danny and with almost no personality of her own beyond “Danny’s sister” and “uses a wheelchair.”
Pulse has few enough pleasures that spoiling the eventual outcome would be cruel; there’s so little else to cling to. It’s enough to say that by the end of the season, the series provides ample proof that Danny’s sexual-harassment claim is not all that it originally seems, and she comes to look at her life, her career, and her relationship from a different perspective. Thank goodness. Imagine if a sexual-harassment case were just a sexual-harassment case? Imagine if someone grew uncomfortable with the idea of having a relationship with their supervisor, and the show were to actually sit with the fallout of that premise? But that show would have to get into how nuanced and challenging and sad it is when good people are stuck with confronting the fact that they’ve done something they shouldn’t. Pulse might even have to take Danny seriously, rather than turning her into a collection of traumas (daddy issues) and phobias (inexplicably afraid of pregnant women). It might even have to take Xander seriously, forcing him to be something more than a sad rich boy doing his very best. But these are all obstacles and opportunities for a different medical show, one more curious and self-reflective than Pulse.
There is exactly one highlight. Pulse features Nestor Carbonell and Justina Machado playing two senior physicians at its Miami-based hospital, and they provide yet another opportunity to think about some show other than Pulse. In this case, it’s an imaginary show, one where they are the leads and Pulse cares about their character development. In that version, maybe Pulse could be about a hospital where its doctors and patients are rooted in the specific cultural realities of living in Florida, where many characters are fluidly bilingual, where the challenges of running an emergency department are directly tied to the specific community where they work, and where questions about identity and patient care have more grounding in contemporary reality.
Pulse is not that, either. It’s not anything, really, except a frustrating mishmash of many better shows crammed into a blender and pulsed until any specific flavor or texture has been pulverized beyond recognition. What remains is a season of TV where people wear scrubs and yell about intubations and central lines, and underneath it all there’s a story about one woman’s unnecessary, unfounded anxiety.
