TV: Pulse (2025)

A crack medical team faces a wild hurricane and certain clinical disturbances

Drs. Simms, Chan and Phillips work to save a life nearly wiped out by a violent tempest

TV: Pulse (2025)

Streaming on Netflix

Which convulses us more, a roaring storm from without or turbulence from within? That rather glaring juxtaposition propels this tumultuous series.

As a massive hurricane’s high winds and torrential rain batter Maguire Hospital, Miami’s busiest Level 1 Trauma Center, we sense that lives will hang in the balance and hearts will be laid bare. Goody! We rub our hands and settle in for the revelations.

Maguire is both an Emergency Room and a top-ranked surgery site, so those fleeing a hurricane they didn’t prepare for show up with a wide range of wounds, lacerations and mental distress.

A barrage of the afflicted is wheeled in on stretchers: partying, drug overdosed, idiotically still festive teenagers; a 99-year-old woman whose heart stills; a jittery couple with a suspiciously underweight baby; a first responder with a badly infected leg wound that requires surgery; a terrified youth whose hand has been severed.

(Luckily, a hardy staffer races out into the rain and finds the errant hand, which fortunately can be re-attached.)

Exacerbating that wave of traumatized patients, the building’s electrical power keeps fading in and out. It’s a good thing the medical team has faith in third-year resident Dr. Danielle “Danny” Simms (Willa Fitzgerald), a skilled diagnostician with a soothing bedside manner and, it’s widely agreed, a bright future.

They’ll badly need her leadership. She’s been working under the Chief Resident, Dr. Xander Phillips (Colin Woodell), but even with the storm raging the staff is suddenly informed that Phillips has been suspended.

Why? Because the day before Danny filed a sexual harassment charge against him, and he’s been demoted until the hospital board can sort out the allegations.

Though she’s never led an ER before, Danny has now been named Acting Chief Resident. Complicating her new role is the startling news that Xander, though under a dark cloud, has been asked to remain on duty due to the patient onslaught from the worsening hurricane.

That would provide enough grist for gossip during ordinary hospital operations. But the disaster’s tumult amplifies other undercurrents roiling these dedicated professionals.

Danny is being closely monitored by Maguire’s chair of surgery and emergency medicine, Dr. Natalie Cruz (Justina Machado), a tough administrator who gives Danny no special dispensation during the crisis.

Working under extreme pressure goes with the “acting” job title, Cruz tells Danny, especially since it’s well known that the bright young doctor hopes one day to actually be Chief Resident.

Even with Xander possibly about to be fired, Danny’s still got competition. Sam Elijah (Jessie T. Usher), another third-year resident, is an ace who’s also in line for the top job. His emotions are scrambled because he openly pines for Danny, even though he and others suspect without solid proof that she’s romantically involved with Phillips.

Indeed, Danny has been heavily getting it on with Xander, but she doesn’t want that compromising truth out in the open before she gets her shot at the Chief Resident gig. Xander, even denigrated, would be a powerful voice in her favor if her chance came up, and Danny doesn’t want it to look like she’s “slept her way to the top”.

Intern Perez and resident physician Chan: clashing personal styles but shared dedication

Then why does she make the harassment charge, we wonder. Maybe that’s precisely her gambit to get the top job, an about face which disturbs Danny but still doesn’t stand in her way. Did Phillips really turn monstrous in their relationship? In flashbacks we see how their coupling intensified, so we need that answer.

Meanwhile, their colleagues keep providing thorough, compassionate care. One sharp up-and-comer is arrogant surgical resident Dr. Tom Cole (Jack Bannon), a gifted Brit who may be positioning himself to move up to a much more remunerative spot on a gold-plated plastic surgery team.

The prospect of catering to wealthy patients is beginning to make treating blood-and-guts wheeled-in common folk, good as he is at it, feel a little bit beneath him.

Danny’s younger sister, Dr. Harper Simms (Jessy Yates), is in a wheelchair, and provides a moving look at the challenges faced by a doctor with a disability.

How she ended up needing a wheelchair is explored in a distressing flashback with the two doctors’ irascible, stubborn father. He especially resists treatment from Danny, who we learn has troubling reason to understand why he lives alone and uses anger to avoid closeness with both his children.

Maguire’s staff keeps both sisters grounded. We come to appreciate Daniela Nieves as Camila Perez, the smiling, upbeat, pointedly overdressed third-year med student (those paisley blouses under her medical smock; that pert ponytail) who doesn’t let her more experienced co-workers’ cynicism get her down.

And there’s her opposite, the dogged, plainly dressed, yet surreptitiously resourceful Dr. Sophie Chan (Chelsea Muirhead), a nervous surgical resident who constantly doubts herself yet repeatedly comes through in a clinch to save patients.

She learns that clairvoyant, unexpected diagnostic instincts, which she’s got in spades, are medical practice’s secret weapon.

One of Pulse’s quiet signatures is its understated drawing on its Miami-Dade County setting. Doctors and nurses breezily alternate between English and Spanish (deftly, succinctly translated in subtitles).

Justina Machado as Dr. Natalie Cruz, Maguire’s implacable, insightful administrator

Dr. Machado and Dr. Ruben Soriano (Nestor Carbonell), Maguire’s senior surgeon, coolly wield their institutional power in a piquant blend of Spanish and English, two seasoned medical pros who like being in command and enjoy sharing a cultural heritage at the same time.

Arturo Del Puerto as witty, no-nonsense charge nurse Luis Dominguez is just like them. He can do a putdown in charming, devastating Spanish like no one else on the team. He fits the series’ ambience. Throughout the episodes, Florida’s food, music and picante vibes linger nicely in the background.

The central question of exactly what went on between Danny and Xander is held in suspension until the final episode, and its revelations are startling and also retain a slight air of mystery.

Both Fitzgerald and Woodell make their steamy romance in flashback alluring, while their present-day tension keeps amping up, so we’re teased about the outcome right up to the climax.

Both actors give immersive, physically adept performances. Seeming like medical professionals, too, since in each tense, tightly edited ER crisis they come off as highly skilled caregivers. It’s not just sex, or possibly even love, that binds them but an overriding dedication to their practice.

Pulse doesn’t break any new ground in medical television drama. There’s nothing surprising about bleeding patients being noisily wheeled in, heavy-breathing hanky-panky between doctors, or power games about who’s going to be the top dog among grasping, ambitious “healers”.

But the series’ lack of surprise is part of its appeal. It resembles aspirin, pretty predictable. Yet like that all-purpose remedy, it puts a smile on your face simply for being, sigh, good for what ails you.