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Brilliant Minds Creator Promises a Medical Drama That Isn't "Tidy"
Showrunner Michael Grassi explains how Brilliant Minds will differ from the typical medical "case of the week" drama.
Television has seen a lot of medical dramas, so standing out from the typical "medical case of the week" format is always a positive. For Michael Grassi, the creator and showrunner of Brilliant Minds, the key to finding a different storytelling path came down to the man who inspired the series, famed British neurologist and author Dr. Oliver Sacks (1933-2015).
While the upcoming NBC medical drama is a contemporary story set in New York City, Grassi based the fictional doctor at the center of the show — Dr. Oliver Wolf (Zachary Quinto) — on the life and writings of the real Sacks, who helped demystify rare and unusual neurological disorders through his non-fiction writing and patient care. Through his books The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, Sacks was able to humanize patient suffering while also digging into the mysteries surrounding their diagnoses.
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Brilliant Minds will feature many of the now-famous cases from Sacks' books, with contemporary twists, and an overall modern approach to normalizing how we speak about brain disorders today. Grassi sat down with NBC Insider to explain how the series isn't about having "tidy" endings for complex medical ailments.
Making Brilliant Minds a Character Drama and a Medical Mystery
A veteran television writer of many The CW dramas including Supergirl and Katy Keene, Grassi is tackling his first medical drama with Brilliant Minds.
"I really do see the show as a combination of equal parts character drama and then high stakes, medical mystery," he explained. "With a lot of medical shows, it's often about the diagnosis and then the cure, and the fix. But when you leave the hospital, it's never really over, right? You're still dealing with so much emotional or mental or even physical fallout.
"One of the things that we love to talk about on the show is that there often isn't a cure," he continued. "In a lot of Oliver Sacks' cases, you couldn't fix the problem and you couldn't make it go away. So we talked a lot about adaptation, like how do Dr. Wolf and the interns and Dr. Carol Pierce help their patients find a way forward when there isn't a cure? And in a way, it's not just about the diagnosis, but it's an emotional mystery/procedural."
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Grassi said he and his writers have put a lot of effort into giving audiences a unique lens in viewing the cases and the patients.
"It's important for our audience to feel really satisfied and we feel like the patient is going to be leaving that hospital with a plan and can continue," he explained.
"Interestingly, we also have patients that are not resolved by the end of the episode, but they're sent off with a plan. And then we also have serialized patients, and we have patients who will hopefully come back in success. So the same way Oliver Sacks' patients really never left his life, our plans are to do the same on our show."
Dr. Wolf Is a Patient Too
Much like Dr. Sacks, Quinto's Dr. Wolf will also be a man with his own medical issues, like face blindness, which makes it near impossible for him to recall what people look like correctly even after he's met them. That and other quirks make him a bit angular to get to know, which Grassi assured will be a big part of the series too.
"When we meet him, he's a loner," Grassi teased. "He has a lot of walls up for reasons we will reveal in the series, and then really peel back those layers. A big part of his seasonal story is about those walls chipping away, and him finding his pack.
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"Dr. Wolf is so dedicated to his patients and helping them live their best lives possible, yet at the same time, he has neglected living his own life," he continued. "Over the course of the season, we'll be rooting for him to start to live a little more. And that'll be a really emotional and satisfying journey, with a few twists and rug pulls, which I can't wait for audiences to see."
Brilliant Minds premieres on NBC on September 23.
