Netflix's 'Pulse' Is the Oozing, Infected Discharge of 'Grey’s Anatomy'

Netflix’s new medical drama Pulse is like what would happen if you put Grey’s Anatomy in a sack, beat it against a brick wall several times, and scooped out the goo. It’s like The Pitt if The Pitt were drop-kicked on its head and steamrolled into a paste by Wile E. Coyote. It’s like if they pulled out New Amsterdam’s guts, blended them into a chunky innard smoothie, drank it, and puked it back onto the screen. It’s like if St. Elsewhere got a nasty infection, and that infection produced half a gallon of pus. Pulse is that pus.

Pulse is not good, and I say that as someone who is still watching a very bad season of its major influence, Grey’s Anatomy. And it’s not just because all hospital dramas pale in comparison to The Pitt — although that is also true — it’s that, in a vacuum, Pulse still sucks harder than jealous hickey-giving teens trying to mark their territory.

Here’s what Pulse has going for it: Willa Fitzgerald, the actress from the first season of Reacher, The Fall of the House of Usher, and, especially, one of last year’s best movies, Strange Darling. Just because she’s in it, alas, does not make her particularly good. She’s written as a whiny, wishy-washy, lovesick feminist noodle saddled with the worst #MeToo storyline ever.

She plays Danny, a third-year resident in Emergency Medicine at Maguire Hospital in Miami, who falls in love with Xander (Colin Woodell), the Chief Resident, who also has a say in who will be chosen as next year’s Chief Resident. The entire first season is basically built around this storyline involving the power imbalance, where various nefarious things are insinuated about Xander before the show realizes (I guess?) that the series still needs Colin Woodell to be its sympathetic male romantic lead. (Woodell is probably best known for The Flight Attendant, but he also looks like the lead of a hypothetical spin-off of You made for the Hallmark Channel.)

The dynamic between Danny and Xander, meanwhile, wreaks havoc on Danny’s best friend, Sam Elijah (Jessie T. Usher of The Boys), who is gunning for the Chief Resident position and at one point suggests that Danny slept her way into a promotion and somehow still manages to maintain his friendship with her! There’s also Danny’s sister, Harper (Jessy Yates), a doctor in a wheelchair owing to an accident that later becomes an insufferable subplot explored through insufferable flashbacks.

Then there’s Tom Cole (Jack Bannon), the arrogant British surgeon whose only defining characteristics are his arrogance and ethical emptiness, and the series’ last-minute too-little, too-late effort to throw him a redemption bone. There are a few real actors here — Néstor Carbonell, Arturo Del Puerto, and Justina Machado — who are all wasted in supporting roles well beneath their talents. On a real hospital drama, they would be the leads.

There’s also a lot of medical jargon here, mostly the same stuff we hear in other hospital dramas. But on a show like The Pitt, you actually believe the actors know what they’re talking about, and it’s so brilliantly written that even the audience can piece it together from context. Here, it feels like they’re rattling off a checklist of medical terms without any sense of what they mean. BILATERAL. HEMOSTATIC. EPPY. TACHY. LASAGNA.

Created by Zoe Robyn (Hawaii Five-O, The Equalizer) and producer Carlton Cuse — the experienced veteran brought in to oversee the writers’ room of first-time showrunners — Pulse could only be compelling to someone who has never seen a medical drama before. Grey’s Anatomy is regularly one of the most-watched television series on Netflix, so I’m sure the streamer wanted to develop their own homegrown version, but this? This is bad. The tattoo on Matt Czuchry’s back in The Resident is more entertaining. I don’t know what Dr. Pimple Popper is, but I’d watch that before sampling Pulse, which is what would happen if you took This Is Going to Hurt, put it through a meat grinder, filled a balloon with the ground hospital-drama beef, and dropped it from the Empire State Building to watch it splat. Pulse is the splat.