The set-up to Brilliant
Minds will seem familiar to many: an exceptional medical genius is lured
into working for an old friend at a hospital reluctantly, is very clearly
anti-social, is forced to interact with a team he doesn’t want to, is
ridiculously blunt with his colleagues and is constantly breaking the rules to
help his patients.
But let me assure you
of one thing: Oliver Wolf is not Gregory House. We see this in the opening
moments of the Pilot where he does several things House would never due: break
a patient with Alzheimer’s out of a long-term care ward of his hospital so he
can play piano at his daughter’s wedding and walk her down the aisle. Wolf is
greeted with the same outrage by the staff of the hospital that House did for,
well, doing anything at Princeton Plainsboro but that’s actually refreshing
too: I’m so used to people being chewed out in hospitals for toying with
patients lives that it’s nice to know that hospitals are basically run by
administrators who honestly consider anything that affects their insurance bad,
even if it helps the patient long term.
Needless to say Wolf is
fired and ends up back at his home, which really looks like he lives in the
woods but doesn’t have the energy to entirely disconnect. A friend of his comes
to see him because he doesn’t have a cell phone (I like him already) and a
landline he never uses. He’s persuaded to come work at a very poor hospital
because of a unique case. That’s actually encouraging too: I’ve gotten sick of
medical dramas where the hospital is a state of the art facility where the
doctors are the best and the brightest and everybody wants to work there. This
hospital, by contrast, looks like a New York hospital circa the 1980s – which
pretty much assures us we’re in the present day. (I can assure you all
hospitals look like the paint is peeling with the halls crowded with gurneys)
Oliver Wolf is a
neurologist who’s actually based on a real and famous neurologist: Oliver
Sachs. Sachs is famous for writing two of the most famous medical non-fiction
books in history: Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a
Hat. I don’t know how much of Wolf is based on Sachs but Wolf is admittedly
likable despite his problems. He suffers from face blindness and has to use
characteristics to tell who people around him are, something he’s reluctant to
share with anyone. He rides a motorcycle, swims in the Hudson every day, grows
plants in his refrigerator and happens to be gay. That last fact is remarkable
for a broadcast drama; the fact that it’s mentioned so casually and barely
talked about in the first two episodes makes it very clear we’re not in
Shondaland. Of course the fact that Wolf cares about his patient makes that
clear too; after watching Grey’s Anatomy for five years I honestly
thought that the interns at then Seattle Grace thought all their patients were
sacks of meat that existed to perform new and interesting procedures on. The
fact that Wolf cares about them – to the point of almost sappy earnestness – is
refreshing after more than twenty years of watching hospital dramas care about
who the doctors are sleeping with and only incidentally who they’re operated
on.
Wolf is played by that
exceptional talent Zachary Quinto, known as Skylar on Heroes and Spock
in J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek films. There are elements of that detachment
that we see in Quinto’s most famous characters as well as the mask they put up
but in the case of Wolf, we do get to see behind it more often, including
flashbacks that we see Wolf himself walk through. It’s clear that Wolf had a
troubled childhood, that his father loved him immensely and his mother was a
brilliant doctor but at best a mediocre parent. It’s not a huge shock to learn
the chief of staff at Wolff’s new hospital is in fact his mother and that the
two have barely spoken for a long time. It’s interesting watching the two of
them: we get a sense of the relationship Meredith Grey had with her mother
before the early onset Alzheimer’s set in but this time we actually see it play
out. Oliver has no interest interacting with his mother, who we can see has
lived her life with a clinical detachment towards everything and honestly
doesn’t have any problem micromanaging her son the way she does everybody else
in the hospital and possibly everyone around her.
But Oliver is
remarkably human and capable of showing compassion for his patients something I
genuinely haven’t seen a doctor try to do in this kind of setting since ER. For
this generation of viewers this may seem sappy; for someone whose spent the
last two decades watching cynical doctors show neither compassion nor humanity
towards anyone it feels like – well, jumping in the Hudson.
That’s not to say that
Oliver’s path doesn’t lead him down dark paths to help his patients: he
routinely takes their medication to know what they’re living through (but
considering his interns pill-pop themselves that’s barely met with a double
take), he engages in experiments that are fake outs to a sense and he clashes
with his colleagues (particularly a caustic surgeon named Nichols played by
Teddy Sears) about how they are doing their job wrong. But Quinto makes up for
it by imbuing his role with compassion and warmth in his slightly detached way.
This is true even with the interns who he
works with who are not in awe of his brilliance. (Also nice.) They actually
clash more with each other than with Wolff, which may remind some of Grey’s but
is honestly how all hospital dramas work. Refreshingly he takes it upon himself
to instruct rather than berate their theories and asks for their help as well
as offers it. In the midst of last night’s episode Dr. Marcus struggled to do a
spinal tap and Wolf called him out for making his patient, already suffering
from a debilitating condition, feel worse. But Wolf then realized how badly he
was blundering. At the end of the episode he instructed Marcus to perform the
procedure on a cadaver and supervised.
Wolf also shows
something I have almost never seen in medical dramas, certainly not this early
on. The capacity to grow and make more of an effort with his flaws. After
clashing with the neurosurgeon in the opening episode he spent most of the
second episode ignoring him, something he tried to deal with involving his face
blindness. However, once he discovered an aneurysm that saved a patient he’d
been trying to help life, at the end of the episode he joked with him, thanked
him and the two bantered a little. We don’t know the neurosurgeon’s sexual
preferences yet so we don’t know if this is the set up of the enemies to lovers
trope. Even if it was, it would be remarkable: have we ever had a network drama
where this trope played out for a gay male? (Inform me if it has and where.)
I find Brilliant
Minds appealing for many reasons. It’s almost a throwback to older medical
dramas such as ER and St. Elsewhere, albeit moved to the present
day. The medical problems are interesting; the writing is good and the
characters are generally likable. I realize the latter might seem benign but
after a quarter of a century watching unlikable geniuses solve problems with no
real human interaction with anyone, this counts for something for me. I don’t
know how long the show will last but I hope it does. TV needs more protagonists
like Oliver Wolf and honestly, it wouldn’t hurt the medical profession to have
more of them too.
My score: 3.75 stars.
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