Netflix’s Pulse Feels Like AI-Generated Grey’s Anatomy

“Did you watch a lot of Grey’s Anatomy growing up?” It’s a question asked in the second episode of Pulse, a novel medical drama now streaming on Netflix, by Willa Fitzgerald’s Dr. Danny Simms, a waifish blonde not unlike Ellen Pompeo’s Meredith Grey. Her fellow physician Camila (Daniela Nieves) confirms that she has. “Okay,” Danny replies. “Try to unlearn that.”

The show could stand to take its own medicine. Created by Zoe Robyn, an alum of network procedurals like Hawaii Five-0 and The Equalizer, and executive produced by Lost’s Carlton Cuse, Pulse is Netflix’s first English-language medical procedural—and a blatant attempt to lure in kids who grew up on Grey’s Anatomy, which is now in its 21st season. Rain-soaked Seattle has been traded for clear Miami. A moody soundtrack of songs by the Fray and Snow Patrol gets swapped for Top 40 hits like Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” and Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” But both shows revolve around a group of diverse, ambitious medical professionals who navigate life and love while also performing radical procedures at a moment’s notice.

Pulse knows it will draw comparisons to Grey’s Anatomy, and makes a few attempts to subvert those expectations. Grey’s famously kicks off with surgical intern Meredith Grey sleeping with a man she’ll only later learn is neurosurgery chief Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey). Their romance is frowned upon, but rendered sexy good fun. The novel series, though, begins with Danny making an HR complaint after getting involved in a power-imbalanced relationship with her own chief resident. The male doctor, Xander (Colin Woodell), is temporarily suspended; Danny, meanwhile, is promoted. Flashbacks gradually reveal that their relationship is more complicated than any disclosure form could capture.

A tortured inter-hospital love affair isn’t Danny’s only parallel to Meredith Grey. She also has a tragic backstory that gets dredged up in the workplace, thanks to the presence of her sister Harper (Jessy Yates)—who is also conveniently a doctor at Maguire. Like Meredith’s little sister Lexi (Chyler Leigh), Harper is sympathetic toward their neglectful father. Danny blames herself for the accident that left Harper in a wheelchair, leading to some tortured lines like this: “You want to suffer more than the people you hurt because maybe if you do, they’ll forgive you.”

Like Grey’s, Pulse loves a catastrophic event. Season one kicks off with a hurricane that forces the hospital into lockdown, and ends with a late-breaking confession from a doctor whose unforced error killed a patient. (Does Richard Webber leaving a surgical towel in a body cavity remain the most egregious mistake in hospital-show history?) Searching for a severed body part, slicing in the dim when the hospital loses power, removing a strange foreign object from a patient’s rectum—they’re all plot points you can find on both Pulse and Grey’s, as well as any number of other medical dramas.

It’s tough to make one of these shows feel purely original; just ask the team behind Max’s hit The Pitt, who are being sued by the estate of E.R. creator Michael Crichton, which alleges that the series is an unauthorized reboot of E.R. The creators of The Pitt deny that accusation. (The Pitt, which has been renewed for a second season, reteams E.R. producers R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells with E.R. star Noah Wyle.) But while similar storylines can be blamed on genre conventions, the one-to-one relationship between Pulse’s characters and their obvious Grey’s inspirations is harder to ignore.