‘Brilliant Minds’ creator Michael Grassi on how his love of Oliver Sacks inspired NBC’s new medical drama

For Michael Grassi, Brilliant Minds began with Warner Bros. Television's desire to create a show based on two books by famed neurologist Oliver Sacks: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars. While doing a deep dive into the late doctor, whose groundbreaking work was dramatized in the movie Awakenings, Grassi tells Gold Derby, "I fell in love with his approach to patients, with his life, with all things Oliver Sacks. I saw a tremendous opportunity to have audiences fall in love with him the same way that so many people have over the years."

From that grew a medical procedural centering on Dr. Oliver Wolf (Zachary Quinto), a neurologist who employs unconventional methods to treat patients suffering from mysterious ailments. Rather than create a period drama centered on the real Sacks, who died in 2015, Grassi saw this as "an exciting opportunity to take all things Oliver Sacks and adapt them into this present-day character, Oliver Wolf, who gets to be all of the things that Oliver Sacks was but also live in our present-day world and be in conversation with things we're dealing with urgently today. As we all know, mental health is something we're all talking about, and something we're all dealing with to various degrees. That's what felt like an opportunity to us."

There was also the opportunity to get into Sacks' personal life, which, because of the time he was alive, was often shrouded in secrecy. "Oliver Sacks spent the majority of his life in the closet, and very, very late in life he came out," Grassi explains. "The idea that we could have a gay lead at the center of a network medical drama felt like something I wish I had when I was growing up. That kind of representation feels so special, someone who gets to be a hero and a doctor, and a son and a friend, and a mentor to interns, but also be gay. It felt really exciting." He worked closely with Sacks' estate, run by executive director Kate Edgar, and during that time, Edgar told him that, "she was always looking for a way to make Oliver feel safe," and she believed the show "was that space where he could finally be safe."

While there's no shortage of medical dramas on the airwaves, focusing on neurology and psychiatry "positions us differently from the other ones," Grassi states. It helps that "our lens is through mental health, not just through the patients, but through our doctors." It's all in keeping with the original source material, which emphasized a relationship between doctors and the people they were treating. "Oliver Sacks really dedicated himself to spending a lot of time with his patients, stepping into their shoes and getting to know them and everything about them," before telling their stories in his books. "That was our guiding light. We're trying to de-stigmatize mental illness, but at the same time letting audiences into these stories that might seem bizarre at first, but really they're human stories, and stories about the human condition. In many ways, it's a medical procedural, but it's also an emotional procedural as well."

That idea of an emotional procedural plays out in Dr. Wolf's approach to patients, which is "so different" from that of typical TV doctors. "There are so many amazing emergency medicine shows out there that I'm a huge fan of," Grassi divulges, "but the nature of emergency medicine is you're spending minutes with a patient at a time, and then you move on to the next." Grassi wanted to explore "the idea that there's care that could exist that's not just three minutes, that's not someone thinking of a one-size-fits-all prescription for you, but figuring out what is the best way forward for this person, not necessarily this patient."

Brilliant Minds is filled with the sort of complicated medical speak that can make a person's head spin, and in writing it, Grassi hopes to never talk down to his audience, instead trusting their ability to keep up. "You want everyone to be in on it with the doctors," he explains. "There's a balance to write about how much jargon you're throwing out versus how much of the human story you're telling." He relies upon his medical consultants to keep things accurate, and ultimately, "the conversations about the human versus the medicine are the conversations we're constantly trying to put onscreen between our characters as well."

It certainly helps to have the dialogue delivered by an actor like Quinto, who was "the first person we ever talked to about this role, and the person we were all hoping and dreaming would do this project. Zach brings so much wit to the role," a similarity he shares with the real Dr. Sacks, who "was also really funny." He also brings "this intelligent curiosity, which is also something that Oliver Sacks had. I love that about our show, and I love that about Zach. Not all doctors on TV are necessarily curious; they're just trying to get the job done a lot of the time. I love that Zach brings this excitement to Dr. Wolf, and even though patients are dealing with things that are challenging, Wolf's curiosity feels like a joy to watch."

Grassi feels the first season reached a creative peak with its seventh episode, "The Man from Grozny," which he describes as "our version of Awakenings in 2025." Like that 1990 film, which recounts Dr. Sacks' attempts to "awaken" catatonic patients through the use of a new drug, the episode finds Dr. Wolf using a revolutionary brain-computer to grant a comatose John Doe the ability to communicate, allowing the doctors to learn about his backstory and grant his wishes as to how he'd like to continue his care. It explores, "when you're doctors and you're working to find a solution for a patient, what happens when that patient doesn't want the same outcome that you want? Giving that patient agency in their own care feels like a story I was excited to tell."

That gets at the very heart of the series, and of its famed inspiration. "Part of Oliver Sacks' mission was to convey the idea that every patient has a story," Grassi says. "One of the things that I really wanted to try to do was visualize what the patients' experiences might be." Rather than dramatize an illness, it's about "capturing what the patient is feeling in their heart and mind, whatever that might be." Taking inspiration from films like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Grassi tried to figure out "what could we do in camera to pull the viewer in" and "be in the patient's mind," which is what Dr. Wolf "is imagining the patient to be is experiencing."

Grassi won a Peabody Award for his work on Degrassi: The Next Generation. He also worked on Schitt's Creek, Riverdale, and Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin.

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