Pulse Bosses on Why They Want People to 'Unlearn' Everything From Grey's Anatomy

In the second episode of Netflix's new hospital drama, Pulse, interim chief resident Danny Simms (Willa Fitzgerald) tells bright-eyed third-year medical student Camila Perez (Daniela Nieves) to "try to unlearn" what's been ingrained in her head from years of watching Grey's Anatomy. The directive comes after Camila professes her affinity to Seattle Grace and innocently questions why the doctors can't sleep "in the on-call room with the bunk beds" — a visual made famous by the ABC series. The cheeky nod was an acknowledgement by the producers of the path that Grey's paved for TV medical dramas that would follow in its footsteps while reminding audiences that Pulse is very, very different.

"We had to acknowledge Grey's Anatomy," executive producer and co-showrunner Carlton Cuse told TV Guide. "It's a great medical show, a great television show period. It looms large in the annals of television. It would be hard for us to make a medical show and not acknowledge Grey's Anatomy. It was a fun joke that was acknowledging that nobody lives in a world where they don't understand that Grey's Anatomy defines [a level] on which everybody operates. It's a very loving wink."

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Created by Zoe Robyn, Pulse at first glance has all the ingredients of being a worthy successor to Grey's. Messy love triangles, blossoming secret romances, and tense hospital politics rule the roost at Miami's Maguire Hospital, the city's busiest Level 1 trauma center. While those elements make up a good portion of what propels the series forward, Pulse is a whole lot more complicated than that.

Set in the present day, the series immediately thrusts viewers into the middle of a destructive hurricane barreling through Florida, a physical manifestation of the damage that's about to be inflicted on Danny and the other residents, interns, and nurses at Maguire. Amidst the storm, she's unexpectedly promoted to chief resident after the doctor who previously held the position, the beloved Xander Phillips (Colin Woodell), is suspended because of a potentially career-ending claim made against him. Flashbacks throughout the season flesh out what happened between them in the past, offering insight into their complex romantic history as they struggle to find a way to work together to save lives in the present.

If there was a doctor duo that could give Meredith Grey and Derek Shepherd a run for their proverbial money, it may very well be Danny and Phillips. After all, the initial idea for Pulse came out of Robyn's desire to examine a relationship that was imperfect and existed in a morally gray area — "and the pitfalls of it, but also the fact that there could be real love in something like this."

"A lot of times when there's a power dynamic relationship portrayed, it's always very black and white. There's always a 'bad guy' and a 'good guy,' and there's always some sort of judgment to be made about it. I think that when people are in relationships like this, there are a lot of complicated feelings. It's a reason that a lot of people like Danny don't go public with that kind of relationship because there's a lot of feelings of doubting herself as much as she feels like other people will doubt her," she continued. "The ER setting, the hurricane, the unexpected promotion — all of that is this outward manifestation of the pressure she's feeling layered on top of her, and they also create a pressure cooker for all our other characters and all the other relationships that we're building."

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The success of Pulse largelyhinges on the believability between Danny and Phillips. Robyn admitted it was nerve-wracking finding the right actors to play them. "It was important to choose the right people, especially because there are a lot of layers to these two," she said. "We were looking for people who could play all of those notes that we had hoped to get across." 

It was a chemistry read between Fitzgerald and Woodell over Zoom ("on Valentine's Day of all days") that quelled any worries Robyn and Cuse had. "It's like a magic X-factor thing that you really can't control. You just felt it," Robyn recalled. "There was no way to really prepare yourself to see what was happening between them and knowing, 'Oh, these are the two right people for us.'"

With Pulse marking the latest medical drama to enter the TV lexicon, what differentiates itself from other shows like Max's new hit The Pitt or Grey's is "the specific definition of the characters." Leaning on the expertise of co-executive producer Joshua Troke, a writer and ER doctor, Cuse said "we tried to come up with our own set of characters and cases that we thought were entertaining, that we were engaged with ourselves. Zoe and I set out to make a show that we wanted to watch. Hopefully, it worked."

Season 1 of Pulse drops Thursday, April 3 on Netflix.