‘Brilliant Minds’ Review: Zachary Quinto Does the Eccentric Genius Thing in NBC’s Occasionally Promising Medical Procedural

The start of the broadcast television season also marks the return of my favorite broadcast television archetype, the antisocial genius who solves crimes/medical mysteries/legal quandaries by alternatingly squinting or staring off into the middle distance.

We know the best shows in this genre when we see them — let’s see how many times I can reference House in this review — and the worst tend to be so instantly interchangeable that even those who’ve dutifully watched six or 12 episodes might not be able to tell one from the other. 

NBC’s new hospital procedural Brilliant Minds is far from that bottom tier. Yet the network is already going out of its way to cause the series to descend into the miasma, rather than achieve clarity as the watchably unremarkable thing that it is.

It all starts with the title, which isn’t to be confused with the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind, HBO’s current exceptional My Brilliant Friend, ABC’s newly premiered (and slightly more distinctive) High Potential or the wholly forgotten CBS dud Pure Genius. It’s a bland name that took the place of the differently silly Dr. Wolf, which wasn’t to be confused with Peacock’s Wolf Life Me, but which definitely seemed to promise a medical drama in which the main character was a physician by day and a werewolf by night.

Nothing in Brilliant Minds is anywhere near that goofy or fun or genre-bending. Based to a nebulous degree on the work of neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, Brilliant Minds focuses on Dr. Oliver Wolf (Zachary Quinto), who is not, in fact, a wolf, regardless of moon phase. He is, however, absolutely a quintessential TV genius. Sometimes he squints hard and figures out impossible diagnoses. Sometimes he does the same by staring off into space, ideally into a flashback. 

Brilliant Minds, created by Michael Grassi, has a thoroughly sturdy and repeatable engine driven by one or two weekly cases and one or two ongoing pieces of mythology and, over the six episodes sent to critics, it quickly establishes a decent ensemble. At times, this is exactly the sort of slightly clever, rarely smart hospital-set drama that could easily find an audience — though at least one part of that repeatable structure is confusingly unsatisfying, and though Brilliant Minds flounders almost any time deviates from its most comfortable rhythm and tone.

The series begins with Oliver being fired from some job. Everybody agrees he’s exceptionally intelligent, but that he just can’t play by the rules. His med school chum Carol (Tamberla Perry) offers him a gig as head of neurology at Bronx General. It’s his last chance, but he’s hesitant for reasons that the show treats as a surprise, but won’t shock anybody once they’re revealed. 

Oliver has a variety of peculiarities — he loves ferns, hates technology and goes for swims in the Hudson (in the pilot and then never again) — and an assortment of childhood issues tied to his stern mother (Donna Murphy) and mentally unstable father (Gray Powell). Adding to the fun, Oliver suffers from face blindness, which the show visualizes, like each installment’s neurological infirmity, only selectively. The condition is simply accepted as Oliver’s superpower: Because he struggles to process faces, he has to pay extra-close attention to everything else. 

The prosopagnosia hinders Oliver’s ability to forge new relationships, for instance with the four interns under his watch. There’s Ericka (Ashleigh LaThrop), a friendly try-hard who knows Oliver’s reputation and worships him; Jacob (Spence Moore II), a former college football star hung up on the athletic life he left behind; Dana (Aury Krebs), who suffers from anxiety and an overreliance on pop culture references; and Van (Alex MacNicoll), who initially seems dull until his “thing” is revealed several chapters in. Further complicating Oliver’s new job is surgeon Josh (Teddy Sears), who disapproves of Oliver’s methods, but who has something important — they’re both gay! — in common with him.

The serialized elements of the series are surely its weakest. The slow unfolding of Oliver’s childhood flashbacks hasn’t revealed anything to justify this sort of elongation, while the dragged-out secrets tied to Van, Dana and Jacob have ranged from way too obvious to way too convenient. Speaking of “way too obvious,” Oliver’s treatment of a John Doe patient takes two or three hours to get to a diagnosis that I guarantee you anybody who has watched a medical show in the past 15 years will have gotten to long before our resident brilliant minds. 

The pacing of individual episodes is clumsy as well. Each one I’ve seen has reached its narrative climax roughly two-thirds of the way through, leaving 10+ minutes of protracted resolution. It works when the emotional investment is immediate, but that isn’t always the case.

Thus far, the show’s sweet spot is when the story starts in the head, but quickly moves to the heart. It’s fundamentally a tearjerker, which is established by the very first scene of the pilot, in which Oliver kidnaps an Alzheimer’s patient played by musical theater legend André De Shields and takes him to his granddaughter’s wedding, where he sings and tears flow like cheap champagne. 

My favorite subsequent chapters fit into a similar effectively manipulative vein, led by an hour focused on Steve Howey as a biker facing an impossible surgical choice and another with Samantha Hanratty as a bride whose wedding night drug experimentation goes wrong. Not content, though, to reside in this genre, Brilliant Minds keeps fiddling. One installment is a political thriller with a clumsy message about veterans’ mental health. Good message, bad episode. Another ostensibly disturbing/creepy/funny plotline involves high school mean girls and an almost supernatural detour. Fun idea, bad episode. 

Quinto’s performance is dominated by a perpetually furrowed brow, but he finds bursts of humor in Oliver’s weirdness that I enjoyed. He and Perry, otherwise stuck with too many expositional declarations about her prickly pal, banter well. Plus, Quinto and Sears have great chemistry in the sort of will-they-won’t-they pairing that remains exceedingly uncommon in a same-sex capacity on the small screen. The various interns, whose dynamic as peers and with Oliver closely mirror interplay between Dr. House and the so-called Cottages, are all fine, with Krebs and LaThrop as the standouts.

It should be enough for this series to come up with a baffling brain puzzle and let these solidly defined characters interact, but it wants to be eclectic. That fits with Grassi’s background, which ranges from Degrassi to Wynonna Earp to multiple Pretty Little Liars spinoffs. The ambition is good, but so far, these efforts haven’t been. The key to whether Brilliant Minds proves more memorable than its title and its basic trappings will be not abandoning aspiration entirely, but finding more consistency moving forward.

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