“Brilliant Minds” gives a true medical pioneer a modern makeover

When he began writing the medical drama “Brilliant Minds” for NBC, series creator Michael Grassi said he had only one actor in mind to play his series’ main character, Dr. Oliver Wolf.

That would be Zachary Quinto, an Emmy nominee whose television credits include “Star Trek” and the anthology series “American Horror Story,” who starred on Broadway in acclaimed revivals of “The Glass Menagerie” and “The Boys in the Band,” “Among other performances.

“I have never seen Zach act safely during a performance. Everything he does always goes big,” Grassi, whose credits include “Schitt’s Creek” and “Riverdale,” told HuffPost. “We’ve seen him play villains before. We’ve seen it in so many genres. But what Zach brings to the show – something I didn’t know was possible – is incredible wit and levity. I can’t wait 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, a world-renowned neurologist and author once called “the poet laureate of modern medicine.”

Like Sacks, Dr. Wolf is both a respected neurologist and a man of extremes – in the show’s pilot episode, he finds himself swimming in the murky waters of New York’s Hudson River in the evening in the face of a career crisis, as the real Sacks was called to do. The character shares Sacks’ love of motorcycles and indoor fern gardens, and also suffers from prosopagnosia, a cognitive disorder also known as face blindness that allows him to empathize with patients in a way that some of his peers do not.

Although Sacks died in 2015 at the age of 82, “Brilliant Minds” is set in contemporary New York. To make Doctor Wolf believable as a modern character, Grassi decided to update some aspects of Sacks’ life. Most importantly, Dr. Wolf is a gay man who does not hide his sexuality, working at Bronx General Hospital, while Sacks remained celibate and in the closet for much of his life.

“Finding someone who is a hero, so dedicated to his patients (and) who is also gay, is exciting to me,” Grassi said. “Even though Dr. Wolf has a lot of walls and deals with a lot of complex cases, I wanted him to live in today’s world. I wanted all of our issues and relationships to feel urgent and relevant to things we’re currently experiencing.”

To highlight other aspects of Dr. Wolf’s personality, Grassi created a quartet of young interns (Aury Krebs, Ashleigh LaThrop, Alex MacNicoll and Spence Moore II), as well as two film 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 a close friend of Sacks.

As for Dr. Nichols, Grassi said he saw the character as “Wolf’s adversary who would have completely different views on medicine and a different point of view about what’s best for the patient, someone who would be a rival to fight against shoulder to shoulder with.” It also gave Quinto a chance to reunite with Sears, with whom he starred in the season premiere of “American Horror Story” in 2011.

While reviews for “Brilliant Minds” have been largely positive, Grassi is aware that some viewers may dismiss the series as just another entry in a television landscape that has no shortage of medical dramas, with “Grey’s Anatomy” entering its 21st season last week , and “ER” is still a favorite series, even though 15 years have passed since its last broadcast.

Grassi says he’s a “huge fan of all of these shows” and expects “Brilliant Minds” to “honor” such predecessors as the season progresses. Still, he’s quick to point out that his show “does something different.”

“What really sets our program apart is Oliver Sacks,” he said. “It’s a love letter to a real doctor who treated real patients and told their stories.”

He went on to note, “A lot of medical shows are usually about a quick fix. We want a cure, a solution… we want everything to be okay and we want to move on. However, in medicine, the reality is that there is often no quick solution. You can leave the hospital and your problems will not be solved. When you hear a diagnosis that has no cure, how do you find a solution? How to find a goal? This is a topic we cover in our show and it feels unique.”

Watch the trailer for “Brilliant Minds” below: