In the midst of lockdown in July 2020, Michael Grassi received a fateful phone call from Greg Berlanti, the influential gay producer and director who had previously worked with Grassi on Supergirl and Katy Keene. Berlanti and Warner Bros. Television had secured the rights to Oliver Sacks’s books and life. And Berlanti asked if Grassi would be interested in creating a TV show tied to the late gay neurologist and writer.
Grassi, an award-winning writer and producer in his own right, was unsure he wanted to take on a medical drama; his past productions, like Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin and Degrassi, were generally geared to teens and young adults. And his knowledge of Sacks was limited. Previously, he had seen Awakenings, the Oscar-nominated 1990 film based on Sacks’s moving 1973 account of temporarily reviving patients with encephalitis lethargica, or “sleeping sickness.” But as he delved into Sacks’s books, which brought a poetic and empathic sensibility to chronicling cases of people with neurological disorders, he became hooked.
“I fell in love with Oliver Sacks,” Grassi attests. “I fell in love with his writing, his cases, his life. And I very quickly went from, I don’t know about this, to, I have to do this, and it became a priority and a passion project.”
This fall, that passion project comes to fruition in Brilliant Minds, an NBC medical drama starring Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf, a modern-day reimagining of the neurologist (Sacks’s middle name was Wolf, which was also a nickname). Grassi is the showrunner and an executive producer. Thus, many of the idiosyncratic qualities that made Grassi fall in love with the “renegade” Sacks are also passed on to Wolf: a love of motorcycles, ferns, weightlifting, the periodic table, and swimming in the Hudson River, to name a few.
Grassi also revered a more revolutionary aspect of Sacks, which was “his ability to take these conditions that were maybe scary, or no one had really talked about before, and tell stories about them and make it about the person instead of the condition. And the way he humanized medicine sort of made me feel like, well, this is something we can do on television as well.”
This mission is clear in the pilot’s emotional cold open, in which Wolf smuggles an older patient out of a hospital and transports him via motorcycle to his granddaughter’s wedding. At first, family members are furious with Wolf, as the patient seems unable to speak or recognize others. But after Wolf places him at the piano, the old man begins to play music with mastery. By the time he finishes the song, he is able to acknowledge and embrace his granddaughter. Don’t forget the tissues.
While Grassi was writing the pilot, his father was prevented from attending Grassi’s wedding due to health issues. The scene represents a kind of “wish fulfillment” that he and many others feel in the face of a family member’s decline, he says. “Maybe it’s better if we just let them rest,” they might reason. And here, a motorcycle-driving doctor saves the day with “very real medicine.”
Sacks’s oeuvre provides Brilliant Minds with a wealth of material: the stories of patients that, on network TV, have the power to reignite conversations about mental illness. Grassi consulted with medical experts to update these cases when needed, so the show feels “very urgent and in dialogue with present day,” he says.
Destigmatizing discussions of mental health was a major motivating factor for Grassi, but not the only one. “One of the biggest things that sort of made me feel like this was the story I had to tell was the opportunity to have a gay lead at the center of a show like this,” says Grassi, who is also gay. “We’ve had gay leads on network dramas before. But this feels new on a big NBC medical drama, and it felt really exciting. And I was like, I have to do this. I have to get this story to the screen.”
“I often think about what it would have meant to me if I would have been watching one of these medical dramas as a kid, and one of the leads was a gay doctor,” he says, adding, “I feel like in a lot of ways, this is the kind of representation I wish I had growing up.”
Quinto had always been Grassi’s top choice to play Wolf. After NBC picked up the pilot, the gay Heroes star was the first actor Brilliant Minds (formerly called Dr. Wolf) reached out to, “and that was the beginning of one of the most incredible collaborations of my career,” Grassi attests.
“The day that I’ll never forget is our first table read where we all gathered,” he says. “And I just remember Zach reading the words for the first time. And I remember feeling really struck by this empathy…the sort of same empathy that I always felt Oliver Sacks had. And he sort of brought a warmth to this character, and an intelligence, and wit, and all of the things that were in my imagination, and then made it so much better because he’s so good.”
JSQUARED PHOTOGRAPHY/NBC UNIVERSAL
Grassi is also proud of the diversity of the larger cast, particularly among the young group of doctors who Wolf (reluctantly) finds himself mentoring at Bronx General. And there is also Wolf’s relationship with Dr. Carol Pierce (Tamberla Perry), an unlikely best friend who pushes him to return to helping patients. “It’s really satisfying to watch Tamberla and Zach go toe-to-toe in scenes. They’re really fun together, and their chemistry is incredible,” Grassi says.
There are key differences between Sacks and Wolf. Sacks came out publicly as gay in his 2015 autobiography; he died that same year at age 82. He was also celibate for decades, though he formed a late-in-life partnership with New York Times writer Bill Hayes.
In Brilliant Minds, Wolf casually jokes about his gay identity in the premiere, a departure that aligns with modern mores. However, the character also has “walls” that inhibit his forming of close relationships with friends, colleagues, and presumably, lovers, says Grassi. Like Sacks, he has a form of prosopagnosia, or “face blindness,” which adds another hurdle. But Wolf may not be fated for celibacy. “In terms of romance, yes, there are some surprises coming up this season for sure,” Grassi promises.
Where the doctors are united is their status as outsiders, which gives them the ability to connect with patients deemed a lost cause by others. Wolf “sits with them. He hears them. I think he helps patients who feel other because he…has also felt other at times,” Grassi says. It’s a worldview that many queer people understand — in addition to the reality that sometimes, there are no tidy endings.
“I think there’s also this myth sometimes that you leave the hospital, and you’re cured, and your problems are over. But that’s never true in real life, right? Like you leave the hospital, and often, you are still living and dealing and adapting with whatever it is you went through. So our goal is to capture that truth and that experience,” Grassi says.
Grassi cites his work on the Canadian teen soap opera Degrassi — he won a Peabody Award in 2010 for an episode that introduced scripted TV’s first trans teen series regular — as a vital experience for helming a major medical drama with an ambition to awaken empathy and connection.
“One of the big things we talked about on that show was this idea that young audiences can come to it and find themselves or their stories and know that they’re not alone,” he says. “And I think interestingly, that’s what Oliver Sacks was about with his writing. And I think that’s what Brilliant Minds is about as well.”
Brilliant Minds premieres September 23 on NBC.
This article is part of Out's September/October issue, which hits newsstands on August 28. Support queer media and subscribe — or download the issue through Apple News, Zinio, Nook, or PressReader starting August 13.
