A TV Doctor With an Unusual Case of Face Blindness

From good doctors to sexy doctors to funny doctors to Chicago doctors, network TV has no shortage of medical professionals wandering its fictional hospital halls. Now NBC has a new twist on the age-old formula: What if there were a doctor with… face blindness?

Okay, to be fair, face blindness is just one of the many quirks that characterize Zachary Quinto’s brilliant neurosurgeon Dr. Oliver Wolf. He also swims in the Hudson River, obsesses over his plants, hates interacting with his co-workers, and will do anything for his patients, including smuggling them across town on his motorcycle when he thinks they need a day out. Still, it’s hard to ignore the hook that sounds like the set-up for a joke even though it’s at least somewhat based on reality.

Brilliant Minds, which premieres Sept. 23, is loosely inspired by real-life neurologist Oliver Sacks, who had prosopagnosia (aka. face blindness) and published stories of unique medical cases like his own in popular books like 1985’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. While Sacks was born in interwar London and started his career in the 1960s, Brilliant Minds sets its story in an overcrowded, understaffed present-day Bronx hospital that’s the only place in town still willing to take a chance on Dr. Wolf’s rule-bending approach.

The trouble is, the exact nature of that rule-bending approach isn’t particularly consistent. Sometimes Dr. Wolf seems to have the social struggles of The Good Doctor’s Shaun Murphy, other times the blunt self-importance of Dr. Gregory House, and still other times the giant heart and troubled backstory of Grey’s Anatomy’s Meredith Grey. The show depicts him as both an introverted loner and a rebellious free spirit in a way that never entirely adds up—particularly in regard to how much his face blindness has shaped his eccentric personality, if at all. (It’s a detail that becomes way less central as the series goes on.)

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That the character feels at all cohesive is a testament to Quinto, who’s best known for playing villains on the small screen and Vulcans on the big one. Brilliant Minds lets him play a warmer, more human character for once, and it’s a welcome change of pace. Quinto’s got natural comedic chops that can make even weaker network-TV jokes work. When his psychiatrist best friend Dr. Carol Pierce (Tamberla Perry) tells him he should be more open about his condition, he deadpans in faux shock, “Carol! It’s 2024, we do not call homosexuality a condition.” It’s a line that could feel hokey if Quinto didn’t deliver it so casually and if his chemistry with Perry weren’t so strong.

Less successful is Dr. Wolf’s mentorship of four thinly drawn Gen Z interns who seem ported over from a cornier show. (One character’s entire personality is that she takes mental-health meds and isn’t afraid to talk about it!) There are also uneven flashbacks that explore how Wolf was shaped by his two doctor parents: his cold, logical mom (Donna Murphy) and his warm but troubled father (Gray Powell). More intriguing is a potential slow-burn flirtation with a fellow doctor portrayed by Teddy Sears, who previously played Quinto’s love interest on the first season of American Horror Story.

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Beyond its casting, the show’s big draw is that it deals exclusively in the kind of quirky neurological conditions that might only come up once or twice a season on a traditional medical drama. There’s the mom who wakes up from surgery convinced that her kids are imposters; the motorcycle gang member contemplating a surgery that would leave him without the ability to form new memories; and a group of teenage girls with mass delusions that they’re all pregnant.

Brilliant Minds leans into the “freak show” quality of weird medical cases by using horror-movie visuals to dramatize how its patients experience their conditions. One patient perceives memory loss as a thick fog rolling in; another sees “ghosts” of his dead army friends. Anyone who’s ever fallen down a medical-mysteries rabbit hole on Wikipedia will have a field day here, even as the show is careful to counterbalance its potentially exploitative quality with Dr. Wolf’s fierce, patient-focused humanism.

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Indeed, in the first six episodes screened for critics, Brilliant Minds regularly swings back and forth between unsettling and downright cheesy, like when one character tells Wolf that his face blindness is a gift because it inspires him to “look deeper” to see the stuff that other people miss. It’s hard to tell where the tone will land in the long run, although the early episodes at least suggest the show is willing to try stuff out until it decides what fits.

While Brilliant Minds doesn’t immediately hit the heights of must-see TV, it’s enjoyable in that familiar network-procedural way. Between the intriguing case-of-the-week mysteries and Quinto’s confident central performance, there’s room for the show to evolve into something genuinely compelling. It’ll just have to figure out which personality fits its face-blind protagonist.