When he started writing NBC’s medical drama “Brilliant Minds,” collection creator Michael Grassi says he had just one actor in thoughts to painting his present’s protagonist, Dr. Oliver Wolf.
That may be Zachary Quinto, the Emmy nominee whose tv credit embrace “Star Trek” and the “American Horror Story” anthology collection, and who has appeared on Broadway in acclaimed revivals of “The Glass Menagerie” and “The Boys in the Band,” amongst different reveals.
“I’ve never seen Zach play it safe in a performance. Everything he does, he always takes a big swing,” Grassi, whose TV credit embrace “Schitt’s Creek” and “Riverdale,” advised HuffPost. “We’ve seen him play villains before. We’ve seen him do so much genre. But the thing that Zach brings to the show — something I didn’t know was possible — is incredible wit and levity. I’m excited for viewers to see how much warmth and humor he brings.”
“Brilliant Minds,” which premiered final week, relies on the lifetime of Dr. Oliver Sacks, the world-renowned neurologist and creator as soon as known as the “poet laureate of contemporary medicine.”
Like Sacks, Dr. Wolf is each a revered neurologist and a person of extremes — within the present’s pilot episode, he takes a night swim within the murky waters of New York’s Hudson River amid knowledgeable disaster, because the real-life Sacks was identified to have finished. The character shares Sacks’ love of bikes and indoor fern gardens, and in addition has prosopagnosia, a cognitive dysfunction additionally generally known as face blindness that enables him to empathize along with his sufferers in methods a few of his friends don’t.
Although Sacks died in 2015 at age 82, “Brilliant Minds” takes place in present-day New York. To be able to make Dr. Wolf plausible as a contemporary character, Grassi opted to offer some aspects of Sacks’ life an replace. Most notably, Dr. Wolf is a homosexual man who makes no secret of his sexuality whereas working at Bronx Basic Hospital, whereas Sacks stayed celibate and was closeted for a lot of his life.
“To find somebody who is a hero, who is so dedicated to his patients [and] who also happens to be gay, is exciting to me,” Grassi stated. “While Dr. Wolf has a lot of walls up and is dealing with a lot of complex things, I wanted him to be living in today’s world. I wanted all of our cases and relationships to feel urgent and in conversation with things we are now experiencing.”
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To flesh out different features of Dr. Wolf’s character, Grassi developed a quartet of younger interns (Aury Krebs, Ashleigh LaThrop, Alex MacNicoll and Spence Moore II) in addition to two foil characters: Dr. Carol Pierce (Tamberla Perry) and Dr. Josh Nichols (Teddy Sears).
Pierce is loosely based mostly on Dr. Carol E. Burnett, the primary Black graduate and one of many first ladies to graduate from New York’s Albert Einstein School of Drugs in 1960, who was additionally Sacks’ shut pal.
As for Dr. Nichols, Grassi stated he noticed the character as Wolf’s “adversary who would have very different ideas about medicine and a different POV on what’s best for a patient, someone who would be a rival who he could go toe-to-toe with.” It additionally gave Quinto an opportunity to reunite with Sears, with whom he co-starred on the premiere season of “American Horror Story” in 2011.
Although evaluations of “Brilliant Minds” have been largely constructive, Grassi is acutely aware of the truth that some viewers might dismiss the present as one more entry right into a TV panorama with no scarcity of medical dramas, with “Grey’s Anatomy” kicking off its twenty first season final week and “ER” nonetheless a permanent favourite 15 years after it final aired.
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Grassi says he’s “a huge fan of all of those shows” and expects “Brilliant Minds” to “honor” such predecessors because the season progresses. Nonetheless, he’s fast to emphasise that his present is “doing something different.”
“What really differentiates our show is Oliver Sacks,” he stated. “This is a love letter to a real-life doctor who treated real-life patients and told their stories.”
He went on to notice: “On many medical dramas, it’s usually about the quick fix. We want the cure, the solution … we want everything to be OK and we want to move on. But in medicine, the reality is that there often isn’t a quick fix. You can leave the hospital and your problems aren’t solved. When you get a diagnosis that doesn’t have a cure, how do you find a way forward? How do you find purpose? That’s a theme we explore on our show that feels unique.”
Watch the trailer for “Brilliant Minds” beneath:
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