Zachary Quinto once played a superpowered serial killer with a keen interest in his victims' brains (Sylar on NBC's "Heroes"). Is it perhaps Hollywood's natural evolution that he now is playing a fictionalized version of a neurologist? Still interested in brains, but in a slightly, er, healthier manner.
Yes, Quinto has returned to the world of network TV for "Brilliant Minds" (NBC, Mondays, 10 EDT/PDT, ★½ out of four), a new medical drama very loosely based on the life of Dr. Oliver Sacks, the groundbreaking neurologist. In this made-for-TV version of the story, Quinto is an unconventional doctor who gets mind-boggling results for patients with obscure disorders and conditions. It sounds fun, perhaps, on paper. But the result is sluggish and boring.
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Dr. Oliver Wolf (Quinto) is the bucking-the-system neurologist that a Bronx hospital needs and will tolerate even when he does things like driving a pre-op patient to a bar to reunite with his estranged daughter instead of the O.R. But you see, when Oliver breaks protocol and steps over boundaries and ethical lines, it's because he cares more about patients than other doctors. He treats the whole person, see, not just the symptoms.
To do this, apparently, this cash-strapped hospital where his mother (Donna Murphy) is the chief of medicine (just go with it) has given him a team of four dedicated interns (Alex MacNicoll, Aury Krebs, Spence Moore II, Ashleigh LaThrop) and seemingly unlimited resources to diagnose and treat rare neurological conditions. He suffers from prosopagnosia, aka "face blindness," and can't tell people apart. But that doesn't stop people like his best friend Dr. Carol Pierce (Tamberla Perry) from adoring him and humoring his antics.
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It's not hard to get sucked into the soapy sentimentality of "Minds." Everyone wants their doctor to care as much as Quinto's Oliver does. Creator Michael Grassi is an alumnus of "Riverdale," which lived and breathed melodrama and suspension of reality. But it's also frustrating and laughable to imagine a celebrated neurologist following teens down high school hallways or taking dementia patients to weddings. I imagine it mirrors Sacks' actual life as much as "Law & Order" accurately portrays the justice system (that is: not at all). A prolific and enigmatic doctor and author, who influenced millions, is shrunk down enough to fit into a handy "neurological patient(s) of the week" format.
Procedurals are by nature formulaic and repetitive, but the great ones avoid that repetition becoming tedious with interesting and variable episodic stories: every murder on a cop show, every increasingly outlandish injury and illness on "Grey's Anatomy." It's a worrisome sign that in only Episode 6 "Minds" has already resorted to "mass hysterical pregnancy in teenage girls" as a storyline. How much more ridiculous can it go from there to fill out a 22-episode season, let alone a second? At some point, someone's brain is just going to explode.
Quinto has always been an engrossing actor whether he's playing a hero or a serial killer, but he unfortunately grates as Oliver, who sees his own cluelessness about society as a feature of his personality when it's an annoying bug. The supporting characters (many of whom have their own one-in-a-million neurological disorders, go figure) are far more interesting than Oliver is, despite attempts to make Oliver sympathetic through copious and boring flashbacks to his childhood. A sob-worthy backstory doesn't make the present-day man any less wooden on screen.
To stand out "Brilliant" had to be more than just a half-hearted mishmash of "Grey's," "The Good Doctor" and "House." It needed to be actually brilliant, not just claim to be.
You don't have to be a neurologist to figure that out.