Though inspired by famed neurologist Oliver Sacks (Awakenings), Brilliant Minds’ maverick doctor hero Oliver Wolf (the intense Zachary Quinto) also owes a debt to his TV predecessors.
Like Hugh Laurie in House, he’s an abrasive rule-breaker, a genius who annoys those in authority while solving profound medical mysteries—think of him as a brain whisperer—with quirky interns eagerly following his every move. Like Freddie Highmore in The Good Doctor, he has a condition you wouldn’t expect in a healer: face blindness. “It makes you look so much deeper. You see the stuff the rest of us miss,” a colleague assures him, perhaps a bit too on the nose.
Also rare in a lead character, Oliver is openly gay, although in the first episodes, his affections are focused solely on his noble profession and his considerable empathy reserved for his troubled patients. The cases of the week tend to strike a deeply emotional chord: The pilot episode depicts a mother who can’t recognize her own children, and in a later episode, a gifted athlete loses connection with her body. The series’ moving prologue, setting the tone, features Tony winner André de Shields as an Alzheimer’s patient who Oliver breaks out of his ward, once again putting patients before protocol, transporting the elderly gent via motorcycle to his granddaughter’s wedding with a plan to unlock his mind, if only for a moment. “He’s lost his memory—not his humanity.”
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These brainy paradoxes bring out an earnest streak in Oliver, who lectures his interns, “Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has.” More advice to one of his acolytes: “Sometimes we need hope to be better at our jobs, and sometimes we need to know when hope is not enough.”
My hope for Brilliant Minds is that it finds the balance between sympathy and sentimentality. My money’s on this lone Wolf.
Brilliant Minds, Series Premiere, Monday, Sept. 23, 10/9c, NBC
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