• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, April 2, 2025

When it comes to high-stakes television drama, nothing beats a hospital emergency room.

In the new Netflix medical drama “Pulse,” a busy urban emergency room on a normal night will simply not suffice.

Instead, it has to be a busy emergency room in Miami in a hurricane in which a school bus full of high school soccer players drives off a bridge, and one of the students is the daughter of one of the hospital’s high-ranking surgeon, and the emergency room got a new leader that very night who got the job because she brought sexual harassment charges against her predecessor who happened to have been suspended on that very day.

That’s what you call a run-on sentence, but it conveys the sensation I felt while watching Episode One of “Pulse” on Tuesday.

Somehow, all of the above (and a few other things too) fit into this one episode’s 45-minute running time. 

This likely will not come as news to anyone who has paid attention to the evolution of prime-time hospital dramas since “ER” (1994-2009).

All the hospital shows are like this. On all of TV’s emergency-room dramas, a nearby airline disaster or catastrophic fire can happen at any moment.

As in all the others, the doctors in “Pulse” divide their time between saving lives and ceaselessly examining their own. Not surprisingly, saving lives makes for exciting drama. Ceaseless self-examination does not.

As noted in a previous TV Blog, “Pulse” is cut from the same cloth as all of TV’s hospital dramas from the last 30 years or so. 

Among other traditional characteristics, the “Pulse” episodes run considerably shorter than an hour, just like old-fashioned linear TV shows, which are cut to those lengths to accommodate commercials within the confines of an hour.

Doctor dramas had been around long before “ER” came along to change the nature of medical shows on TV.

Sheerly by coincidence, a few days ago, we lost one of the icons of an earlier time in the history of TV medical shows -- Richard Chamberlain, who became a star in the title role of “Dr. Kildare” (1961-66). He died last Saturday at age 90.

Why bring him up in a TV Blog about a new, very modern hospital drama making its debut this week on Netflix? I’m not exactly sure, but there must be a connection in there somewhere.

“Pulse” premieres Thursday, April 3, on Netflix.