Netflix’s new medical drama Pulse immediately brings viewers into the world of Maguire Medical with two major developments: a catastrophic hurricane and the show’s main character Danny (Willa Fitzgerald) having filed a sexual harassment claim against chief resident Phillips (Colin Woodell).
“It’s perfect to start us off with this season because we have the stakes already as high as we think they can go from the jump,” Fitzgerald tells The Hollywood Reporter of the show’s choice to drop viewers in the middle of a literal hurricane.
“Something that I really love about this show is that from the first episode to the last, your understanding of these characters and what they’re experiencing radically changes,” she adds. “Our understanding of [Danny] becomes so much more complicated over the course of the 10 episodes. It was really fun to throw her in the deep end from the get-go and then unravel how she got there.”
Constantly switching between present and flashback, Pulse’s first season unravels the complicated dynamic between Danny and Phillips, who are revealed to have been romantically linked in some way by the end of the first episode.
“Phillips is in the dark place at the beginning of the show,” Woodell explains, adding it was difficult as an actor to work backwards despite not knowing the full story.
“In that opening moment, Phillips has lost his job that he cares deeply about, and he’s been blindsided by a person that he cares deeply for and he’s having to pick up the pieces pretty abruptly while a hurricane’s about to hit the hospital,” he says. “It’s a lot of baggage, and it’s almost like one of those experiences when it rains to pours.”
The series, the streamer’s first English-language medical procedural, doesn’t shy way from the comparisons it’s bound to get. “Did you watch a lot of Grey’s Anatomy growing up?” Fitzgerald’s Danny asks the department’s new intern Camila [Daniela Nieves] after the younger suggests the doctors stay in the on-call room with bunk beds, something popularized by the ABC medical drama. “Try to unlearn that.”
Fitzgerald says, “I grew up watching House. I love the early seasons of Grey’s Anatomy and rewatched them in the pandemic. I had the really cool opportunity to go to an emergency room in California right before we started. I spent the day there shadowing an emergency doctor and the resident who was working with him.”
Fitzgerald says the experience to see real doctors at work was very impactful to the start of her season. “I saw firsthand the utter professionalism and calm that pervades the emergency room even when the most extreme cases were coming through the door,” she says. “It was also really important to me that there was a real authenticity in terms of just the environment of the doctors when they’re working and the real sort of capability that even a third year resident would have.”
As Pulse progresses into its later episodes, it sets itself apart by living in space not always show on screen. “I think that the show lives in that gray area for the entire season,” Fitzgerald says.
“I think that what really does set it apart for me just in terms of even the ways that we think about good guys and bad guys on television,” she adds. “The way that you feel about Danny or Phillips in episode one is very different than the way that you feel about those characters in episode five, which is very different than you feel about those characters in episode 10.”
Pulse is now streaming all episodes on Netflix.
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