REVIEW: ‘Pulse’ Is A Grey’s Anatomy Speed Run

Created by co-showrunners Zoe Robyn and Carlton Cuse, Pulse is a Netflix Original series that aligns with streamers’ embrace of the procedural melodrama that network television has been defined by. Whether it’s Prime Video’s On Call or MAX’s The Pitt, the industry is all in on procedural drama with mixed results. The series stars Willia Fitzgerald, Colin Woodell, Justina Machado, Jack Bannon, Jessie T. Usher, Jessy Yates, Chelsea Muirhead, and Daniela Nieves.

In Pulse, a hurricane barrels towards Miami’s busiest Level 1 Trauma Center, and it’s all hands on deck. Central to the series is third-year resident Dr. Danny Simms (Willa Fitzgerald), who is unexpectedly thrust into a promotion when the hospital’s beloved (and rich) Chief Resident Dr. Xander Phillips (Colin Woodell) is suspended. Only the knowledge that Danny filed the complaint starts to spread, and it puts her at the center of her own storm. While the interpersonal drama intensifies, so does the weather.

With the worsening storm and an onslaught of trauma cases, the hospital goes into lockdown, and Danny and Phillips are forced to find a way to work together. But as the complications with the complaint grow, Xander stops abiding by the slander and instead lets it slip that the two of them were in a complicated and illicit romance and essentially living together.

There is a core concept that works in Pulse, but it doesn’t find its footing.

The rest of the ER is left to process the fallout of their relationship while balancing their own challenges. For some, it’s personal boundaries eroding, and for others, it’s seeing their family members come in with the trauma cases. Still, all of the characters have to work under the pressure of life-or-death stakes and put their interpersonal drama to the side.

Pulse opens with a few episodes centered around a natural disaster, giving the audience the feeling that it will take place in real time or at least just over the course of one event. Instead, Pulse focuses on the hurricane, its fallout, and the mess that people made along the way.

To its credit, for all of its melodrama, Pulse gets one thing extremely grounded: Spanglish. Set in Miami, it’s only natural that many of the doctors we spend time with and are in leadership positions are Latinos. More importantly, the way that they communicate with each other changes as they move through the hospital. More senior doctors speak to each other in Spanish; when they speak to younger doctors and residents, they switch to Spanglish, and all of it feels lived in.

Often, when Spanglish is added to a script, it involves broken Spanish with words that you wouldn’t usually say in Spanish when having a free-flowing English conversation. Here, though, Pulse has captured what conversations look like between friends and family and ultimately captured them exceptionally well. It helps to showcase the rapport that each member of the staff has with each other and with those they’re close to.

Miami comes to life in Pulse, and that means Latinos are at the center.

Justina Machado as Chief Natalie Cruz and Nestor Carbonell as Dr. Ruben Soriano are two of the best characters Pulse begins to develop. Their friendship spans decades, and their importance matters most. As we see the complexities of Cruz’s family life as a single mother, Soriano is key to her navigating fear when her daughter becomes a victim of the hurricane. He is also her rock when an old flame turned enemy enters the picture and vies for Cruz’s job. Cruz and Soriano support each other. While they both deal with their own drama around the residents, they are charismatic and leave me wanting to learn more about them.

But where Pulse does extremely well regarding platonic and familial relationships, it severely misses the mark with its core romance. Simms and Phillips are both in love with each other—that’s a given. That said, they are toxic, as you’d see in any medical drama. While I don’t like comparing series, Pulse runs the Grey’s Anatomy gambit and does it at a breakneck pace.

While Phillips isn’t the Attending, he is the Chief Resident and has enough power to dictate who gets the role next. That said, Simms still jumps into the romantic fray, ignoring the issues until the friends around her point them out and she starts to question everything.

Modeling the Grey and McDreamy pipeline of passion to concern about being seen as sleeping your way to the top to break up to still being in love, Simms and Phillips do it fast. Most of the relationship is told through flashbacks. Ultimately, what we see in the beginning is just the anger.

The vibes in this medical romance turn rancid the longer the series goes.

Simms reported Phillips for harassment. The first two-thirds of the season are dedicated to painting Phillips in a terrible light, or at least from Simms’s perspective, despite how good he is. Only as the season begins to evolve does the tropey romance begin to feel frustrating, especially when Simms dances around the idea that her harassment complaint was unwarranted.

It’s a moment that doesn’t understand the issue that keeps reports of harassment and assault low. The assumption that you’re lying. To walk a middle path, Simms says that all she needed was for Phillips to recognize his faults. And then the romance begins to pick back up as if a complaint was never filed. The optics of this choice makes the romance rancid, and Simms can never make a clear decision as to whether or not Phillips did something wrong. But this isn’t a gaslighting story. It’s one where Phillips is vaporized, and we learn as an audience he wasn’t bad at all, just from a bad family.

As the main characters, Simms and Phillips are frustrating in a way that most leading romances are in procedural television. But the fact that Pulse runs through 24 episodes’ worth of plot in just eight is astounding. It makes everything a speed run and, by doing so, makes it harder to understand any change in motivation or character arc. How can these characters change so fast? is something I kept asking myself. Characters in Pulse float in the air, moving where the wind blows them almost forcefully. The breakneck pacing of the series doesn’t only affect the core romance but everything around it.

While the bulk of Pulse is focused on one disaster, the rest of it runs through medical melodramas’ greatest hits, using really bad CGI to accent the weird Miami long shots of the hospital. Pulse is a fascinating case of a competent and genuinely interesting cast stuck in a script that refuses to take its foot off the gas pedal, as the dizzying experience leaves any idea of growth behind.

Netflix’s Pulse struggles to stand out among the rest of streaming’s procedural medical dramas.

But that all leads to the main question of any review. Is Netflix’s Pulse worth watching? To be honest, with shows like The Pitt wrapping up and other cable TV offerings like 9-1-1 and Grey’s still going, it’s hard to see where Pulse fits into it all. While it’s a constant critique of streaming television, it has to be made here. A 16-episode order would have done this story good. It’s worth a watch, but it’ll just remind you of everything else you could be watching instead.

The compelling parts of the characters that do reveal themselves need more time. In fact, outside of the leading duo, we don’t truly get enough time with any other character to appreciate them. While Dr. Natalie Cruz (Justina Machado) and Dr. Sam Elijah (Jessie T. Usher) emerge as characters to follow and Dr Sophie Chan’s (Chelsea Muirhead) quirks and possible crush on her best work friend are endearing, we just don’t know enough about them.

Pulse is the best example of the ills that come with truncated seasons of television, especially in a format known for being kind of never-ending or, at the very least, having us spend so much time with the characters that we feel like we know them. Here, I don’t feel like I understand any of them, even when the drama ramps up, and the emotion is supposed to take the front seat.

There is a world where Pulse does well and gets rounded out with a 16-episode order. But in this timeline, we’re stuck with a story that can’t focus. Zoe Robyn and Carlton Cuse, as showrunners, have enough creative vision and understanding of the genre that something good could have come of this. Instead, it’s just a hollow race to a second season I can’t even imagine coming.

Pulse is streaming now exclusively on Netflix.