‘Pulse’ Bosses Tease Complicated Romance & ‘Pressure Cooker’ of Netflix’s New Medical Drama

Netflix is hopping on board a very popular genre right now — the medical drama — with its first-ever English language series of the kind.

In Pulse, third-year resident Dr. Danny Simms (Willa Fitzgerald) is unexpectedly promoted when Chief Resident Dr. Xander Phillips (Colin Woodell) is suspended — just as a hurricane is heading straight towards Miami’s busiest Level 1 Trauma Center. But with the onslaught of trauma cases and the hospital in lockdown, the two doctors must find a way to work together, even as the shocking details of their complicated and illicit romance begin to spill out.

Below, creator, co-showrunner, and executive producer Zoe Robyn and co-showrunner and executive producer Carlton Cuse preview the new medical drama.

This is the first ever English language medical procedural on Netflix. Was there any pressure knowing that?

Carlton Cuse: Yeah, there was a lot of pressure. I think every show has a lot of pressure on it, particularly these days, but obviously Netflix hadn’t done a medical show, so the expectations were high. And while that does exist, I think that all you can really do as a showrunner is try to make the best version of the show that you yourself want to see. And I think that’s what we tried to do.

What excited you about dropping us into the action in the middle of most of these relationships already in the middle of this major emergency heading their way with the hurricane in the streaming format with only 10 episodes?

Zoe Robyn: I think the idea from the very beginning was really to use the medical format to illustrate this relationship between Danny and Phillips at the center of it. We really felt like that was the story that we wanted to tell. And I think in piling on the sort of pressure cooker of the hurricane and of Danny getting the job, Philips getting suspended, all of that happening at once, the intention was to put as much pressure as we could on Danny and sort of exacerbate this already really difficult situation that she finds herself in with Phillips. And so all of the pressures of that, including just working in an ER and the life and death stakes of that, was really just to bring out those character dilemmas and conflicts.

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'Pulse' Trailer Teases Danny & Phillips' Complicated Romance

How much time will be covered over the course of the first season?

Cuse: I think it’s about 10 days. It’s quick. The hurricane is only in the first three episodes. And then the fourth episode was the aftermath and then [we] go on to sort of regular life in the hospital. But each episode is about a day.

Danny is promoted at the beginning of the season right before the hurricane. There’s the stuff that she’s dealing with Phillips. What can you say about how she handles the promotion amidst all of that and how everyone else is handling her being promoted?

Robyn: She handles it like a real person would. We really want to not make these superheroes. Talking about Danny specifically, we really wanted to make her — she’s obviously a very strong character, but I think we wanted to show that imposter syndrome, the sort of confidence knock that she gets with having all this scrutiny on her as a result of the HR claim. We really wanted to put her through this very difficult situation and make her very brave and very vulnerable and very fallible and all of those things that would really come up for a woman in this position. And at the same time, she has to deal with the work of saving lives. I think we really tried to do that for every character. What would this person really do in this situation? Let’s endeavor to really dig into these people as people and not just superhero doctors.

Speaking of Danny and Philips’ relationship, because it is so complicated and there are so many layers to it, what can you preview? What can you say about their interactions as a result of all those layers?

Cuse: I think what’s interesting about our show is that at the center of it is this very complex relationship between these two doctors. And by the way, that is pretty common in the medical world because medicine is so consuming and involving that a lot of relationships arise between medical professionals, but there are so many layers to it. There’s a personal layer, there’s a professional layer, and those layers are each complicated in their own ways by the life and death stakes of what they’re doing as doctors. I think that it’s hard when you commit yourself so fully to a job that you really have no opportunity to meet anybody outside of work. But then if you get involved with somebody at work, it’s very tricky waters to navigate, and I think what we really love about our show is that through flashbacks, we explore what happened in their relationship and we think the audience will be really interested in seeing how that whole relationship unfolded across the season.

Robyn: And I think we also tried to really make it a balanced view of this relationship. We wanted to show all of the gray area in the relationship rather than sort of paint it as a black-and-white thing. We really wanted people to come away with it from it seeing both perspectives, both Danny and Phillips’s view on this and how they both, well-intentioned, made mistakes and found themselves in difficult positions because of the relationship.

Can you say how long they were together before the season begins and where they stand when it begins?

Cuse: I don’t think we really can. I think what we can say is that they had a professional relationship for a year from the time that Phillips arrived at the hospital. But we wouldn’t really want to say too much about their personal relationship because that’s the mystery of, how did that happen? What happened? How did it evolve? Those are some of the central questions that we think are going to be really interesting for the audience.

Jeff Neumann/Netflix

Cruz (Justina Machado) is the one who promotes Danny. What does she see in her and what can you say about that dynamic?

Robyn: Cruz is put in a very difficult position when Phillips is suspended. I think that she’s always seen Danny as a very promising doctor and she is rooting for her. But I think when Phillips is suspended and Danny is the one who brought the complaint against him, Cruz finds herself in this position where she needs to act pragmatically for the optics of the hospital. But at the same time, she’s a woman and she sees the position that Danny is in as a young woman. And I think that we’re going to find that Cruz has her own perspective on that, obviously having come up as a woman in a very male-dominated field. So I think we’re going to sort of peel back the layers of Cruz’s decision to promote Danny to interim chief and then the dynamics of that relationship between Cruz and Danny, I think, is one of the richest relationships in the show.

What are some of the other personal challenges the doctors will be facing?

Cuse: I think each of the characters has a pretty interesting storyline. For instance, Tom Cole, Jack Bannon‘s character, is kind of trying to figure out basically what kind of medicine he wants to practice and also who he might find as a partner in his life. And I think that that’s a really kind of compelling set of dynamics. A lot of these characters, the medical residents, are at that point in their careers where they’re trying to sort out, what is my professional life going to look like? But at the same time, they’re also at an age where they’re trying to figure out, who do I want to have as a partner? How do I want to lead my life? Who am I romantically interested in? I think those stories are really going to be fun and engaging for the audience.

How does this hurricane challenge the doctors? How many of them end up in direct danger themselves?

Robyn: The hurricane creates a lot of conflict and a lot of complication in all of the medical cases and in the personal relationships with the doctors as we start the show. First of all, they all have to work together and can’t leave the hospital until the storm is over. It’s the thing of just being forced together at the same time as this big sort of secret is coming out between Danny and Phillips, and I think that it’s kind of the rock in the pond that creates ripples for everyone else, too, because it’s going to affect all of the rest of our cast of characters. And then of course, it affects the medical. We’ll see it sort of directly affect Cruz’s story in the early part of the season, which has ramifications for her throughout the season. It is a huge, big inciting incident.

What can you tease about how the season ends to set up a potential second, and how long are you thinking about this show going? Medical dramas can last for years.

Cuse: I think that’s one of the reasons people enjoy medical dramas, is you can kind of get engaged with a set of characters over a long period of time, and we hope that’s the case here, too. I love the fact that Meredith Grey [Ellen Pompeo on Grey’s Anatomy] went all the way — I mean, across 21 years of that show. The hospital’s freaking named after her. It’s awesome. I think for us, we would love the audience to develop a really strong long-term relationship with these characters, and we would love to deliver a fresh set of stories every year that brings you up to speed with where they are and what’s going on in their lives.

Is there a cliffhanger at the end of the season to set up a second?

Robyn: I don’t think we can say, but I guess what I would say is that we always meant for the show to be character first. We always meant the show to be a workplace drama that happens to take place in an ER. And it’s really about the people. It’s really about these character stories. And so I think whatever cliffhangers we have in store for the end of the season, they are going to hinge on these character stories that we’re going to build and that people are going to fall in love with. We fell in love with our cast, and we think that the audience will, too.

Pulse, Series Premiere, Thursday, April 3, Netflix

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