In ‘Brilliant Minds,’ A Real-Life Queer Hero And Medical Pioneer Gets A Modern Makeover

When he began writing NBC’s medical drama “Brilliant Minds,” series creator Michael Grassi says he had only one actor in mind to portray his show’s protagonist, Dr. Oliver Wolf.
That would be Zachary Quinto, the Emmy nominee whose television credits include “Star Trek” and the “American Horror Story” anthology series, and who has appeared on Broadway in acclaimed revivals of “The Glass Menagerie” and “The Boys in the Band,” among other shows.
“I’ve never seen Zach play it safe in a performance. Everything he does, he always takes a big swing,” Grassi, whose TV credits include “Schitt’s Creek” and “Riverdale,” told 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 last week, is based on the life of Dr. Oliver Sacks, the world-renowned neurologist and author once referred to as the “poet laureate of contemporary medicine.”
Like Sacks, Dr. Wolf is both a respected neurologist and a man of extremes — in the show’s pilot episode, he takes an evening swim in the murky waters of New York’s Hudson River amid a professional crisis, as the real-life Sacks was known to have done. The character shares Sacks’ love of motorcycles and indoor fern gardens, and also has prosopagnosia, a cognitive disorder also known as face blindness that allows him to empathize with his patients in ways some of his peers do not.
Though Sacks died in 2015 at age 82, “Brilliant Minds” takes place in present-day New York. In order to make Dr. Wolf believable as a modern character, Grassi opted to give some facets of Sacks’ life an update. Most notably, Dr. Wolf is a gay man who makes no secret of his sexuality while working at Bronx General Hospital, while Sacks stayed celibate and was closeted for much 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 said. “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.”
To flesh out other aspects of Dr. Wolf’s personality, Grassi developed a quartet of young interns (Aury Krebs, Ashleigh LaThrop, Alex MacNicoll and Spence Moore II) as well as two foil characters: Dr. Carol Pierce (Tamberla Perry) and Dr. Josh Nichols (Teddy Sears).
Pierce is loosely based on Dr. Carol E. Burnett, the first Black graduate and one of the first women to graduate from New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1960, who was also Sacks’ close friend.
As for Dr. Nichols, Grassi said he saw 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 also gave Quinto a chance to reunite with Sears, with whom he co-starred on the premiere season of “American Horror Story” in 2011.
Though reviews of “Brilliant Minds” have been mostly positive, Grassi is conscious of the fact that some viewers may dismiss the show as yet another entry into a TV landscape with no shortage of medical dramas, with “Grey’s Anatomy” kicking off its 21st season last week and “ER” still an enduring favorite 15 years after it last 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 as the season progresses. Still, he’s quick to emphasize that his show is “doing something different.”
“What really differentiates our show is Oliver Sacks,” he said. “This is a love letter to a real-life doctor who treated real-life patients and told their stories.”
He went on to note: “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” below:
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