Note: The Nocturnists is created primarily as a listening experience. The audio contains emotion, emphasis, and soundscapes that are not easily transcribed. Our transcripts are produced using both speech recognition software and human copy editors, and may not be 100% accurate. Thank you for consulting the audio before quoting in print.

Emily Silverman: Support for The Nocturnists comes from the California Medical Association.

Team The Nocturnists: At The Nocturnists, we are careful to ensure that all stories comply with healthcare privacy laws. Details may have been changed to ensure patient confidentiality. All views expressed are those of the person speaking and not their employer.

Emily Silverman: This is The Nocturnists: Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. Today, I'm joined by Michael Grassi, showrunner and screenwriter, and Daniela Lamas, ICU physician and writer. Michael began his career writing teen dramas like Degrassi and Riverdale, but found unexpected inspiration in the writing of Oliver Sacks, which led him to create Brilliant Minds, a new NBC medical drama. Daniela, who cares for critically ill patients at Brigham and Women's Hospital, has also built a parallel career in television writing, bringing authenticity and nuance to projects like Brilliant Minds. In my conversation with Michael and Daniella, we talk about how Oliver Sacks' cases inspired Brilliant Minds and shaped its distinctive focus on adaptation to disease, rather than cure of disease, how the show portrays patients learning to live with conditions like color blindness or locked-in syndrome, and the power of storytelling to reframe how we think about neurological illness. Before we dive in, take a listen to the pilot for Season 2 of Brilliant Minds, which premieres on September 22 on NBC and streams the next day on Peacock.

[Trailer - Brilliant Minds Plays]

Dr. Oliver Wolf: The human brain, it can still leave us completely mystified.

Speaker 5: Do you see something?

Speaker 6: Hidden cameras are all over the place.

Dr. Oliver Wolf: She's experiencing Truman Show syndrome. The patient has no control over his own arm.

Speaker 7: Says here he's non-speaking.

Dr. Oliver Wolf: Non-speaking is just a symptom of something bigger. The question is, what?

Speaker 8: I know you're not a real doctor.

Dr. Oliver Wolf: You're right. I just play one on TV.

Speaker 9: Brilliant Minds, premiere September 22 on NBC and Peacock.

[End Trailer]

Emily Silverman: I am sitting here with Michael Grassi and Daniela Lamas. Michael and Daniela, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Michael Grassi: Thank you for having us. We're really excited to be here.

Daniela Lamas: Thank you.

Emily Silverman: Super excited to have this dynamic duo of film and TV and medicine and writing. Starting with you, Michael, maybe you could just tell us a bit about your background in show running and screenwriting, and what led you up to this current medical storytelling project?

Michael Grassi: That's a good question. I started my career telling stories in high schools. I started on a drama called Degrassi, which went for many, many, many seasons. I worked on it for about five years, and it's where I really cut my teeth and learned how to tell a story. Then I moved to LA, and I kept telling high school stories at Riverdale for five more seasons. Then I went to Millwood High for Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, where I kept telling high school stories. I loved doing it so much because I felt like the experience was so universal, and the stories were so much in my back pocket, and I loved telling coming-of-age stories and stories about firsts.

Then this opportunity came along. Warner Brothers sent me two books, Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Anthropologist on Mars. At first, I didn't quite know if this was my story to tell. I didn't know if I wanted to create a medical drama. I very quickly steeped myself in all things Oliver Sacks, not just those two books, but basically everything he's ever written and done. I fell in love with him. I fell in love with his work. I fell in love with his life.

I fell in love with his approach to medicine. I saw an opportunity to have audiences fall in love with this approach as well. It became my passion project and my number one priority. I was surprised by how much it became a story I needed to tell. That's my origin, and how I got to Brilliant Minds without getting into too much detail.

Emily Silverman: They sent you the book because they wanted to do something about Oliver, and they thought you might be the one for it or why did they send you the book?

Michael Grassi: Yes, they sent it because they-- the question was, do you want to create a show either about Oliver Sacks or inspired by Oliver Sacks? They wanted to adapt

something for network television specifically. This feels like a long time ago now. It was really in the middle of COVID when this all came up. These things always take a long time.

That was the intention. It was to create a television show for a network inspired by these materials.

Emily Silverman: Daniella, tell us about your medical career and your writing career, and what brought you to this moment.

Daniela Lamas: Sure. I'm an ICU doctor, so medical ICU. As Michael knows, I love medical TV shows in a non-ironic. I watch them. There was a time not that long ago that I could say I was fully up to date with Grey's Anatomy, but that time passed this past season. Just that, I think, gives you enough of a sense. Why? Sure, they're fun, et cetera,

but I've long been really interested in how medicine is portrayed to the public and stories on network television, particularly, they reach far more people than the

essays that I'll write.

At many intervals over the years-- I'm not a researcher, and that's been a deep sadness for the people who oversee me at the Brigham, and for me too, over over years.

At many junctures where people have told me to write grants over time, particularly in fellowship, I did a lot of freelance reporting, so I found a lot of joy in that. I would also find myself Googling, really, like, medical consultant, how do I work on a TV show?

I emailed a ton of people, I would say, none of whom responded, until ultimately, the head of The Resident, which was the first medical TV show I worked on, replied to me on Facebook, essentially because she had a pension for Harvard doctors. That worked really well. I was a consultant on that show, and then got to be in the writers' room for a couple of years.

When that show ended, it was a really fun experience, but I came into it thinking, "Oh, I'm going to make this more realistic." Like, "What does that even really mean?" I think that there's some aspect of trying to make the lingo right, but there's also this sense of, does it feel true? Even if it's not exactly the way it would play out, but does it feel real?

Many medical shows they don't feel real, because the story ends when the person goes to surgery. It's like, "Oh, they wake up."

That's why I was so excited when I learned about Brilliant Minds and had the opportunity to meet with Michael and talk about it before the first season, because this was a show where the goal was to tell stories that don't just end at diagnosis, and to talk about bad adaptation and tell the story beyond one generally axis credits. That definitely aligned with my interest in the ICU and what happens after, and telling these stories that we don't generally see. What brought me to this show specifically, and medical shows broadly, which I still watch.

Emily Silverman: How did you two find each other? Who found who, and how did you come together?

Michael Grassi: Daniella, [crosstalk] I think it was your previous showrunner who emailed me the most aggressive recommendation I've ever received from anybody in my entire life. I had the opportunity to read Daniela, and I loved her on the page, and I loved her work in The New York Times. Then I got to meet her. I always say my best meetings are when I read someone on the page, and then I meet them in person, and everything clicks into place. That definitely happened with Daniella. She is a star in our room, and she's excellent, not only at the medicine, but also at the emotional stories we tackle. It's a delight to work with her every day.

Emily Silverman: Tell me about what attracted you to Oliver, the character, and what was your approach in developing something inspired by Oliver. As Daniella just said, there are a lot of medical TV shows out there. Everyone has a slightly different angle. Tell me about your vision when you were putting this together.

Michael Grassi: I've always felt that a lot of medical dramas that I watched were so focused on a diagnosis and a fix and a solution. Reading about Oliver Sacks' cases, the thing that really struck me was that often there wasn't a cure, there wasn't a fix. How do you live with a diagnosis? How do you adapt? How is a diagnosis perhaps something that helps you grow in a way you didn't expect, or how are challenges sometimes, how do they transform your life and make you see your life differently? I feel like is something I hadn't seen explored that directly in medical dramas before.

I was really excited to explore what that could look like on network television. When there isn't a fix, how do you help a patient find a way forward in a satisfying way in a 42-minute episode on network television? Was an exciting challenge to me. Another thing I was really excited about was really simply Oliver Sacks felt like a doctor who took time with patients. It was really important for him to get to know them and to step into their shoes and try to see the world the way they see the world, and try to understand the world, and try to help them adapt based on who they were, as opposed to what their condition is.

That was also exciting to me. Like, what would it be like for our contemporary version of Oliver Sacks to step into these patients' worlds and take conditions that are in the mind and the brain and visualize them somehow? Not necessarily a direct depiction of what their diagnosis is, but what it might feel like, or what the experience might be like, and trying to show the audience and have them experience it alongside the patient.

There's this tremendous empathy with Oliver Sacks that was really appealing. It's so different from having-- we've all spent time in hospitals, and sometimes you get minutes with a doctor, or moments with a doctor, and the idea that you can have somebody who takes time and cares and listens. There was a wish-fulfillment quality to the storytelling that I think was exciting to me in the room when we started breaking these stories. Also, Oliver Sacks, the person, the man, he just lived this extraordinarily big, full, robust life.

Something else that was really exciting to me was the opportunity to have a gay lead at the center of a network medical drama. I'm always really excited to have characters front and center that we haven't seen at the center of a show like this before. That's one of the reasons why this became such a huge priority for me. I felt it was the kind of representation that I wish I had growing up. The idea of turning on ER and having the lead be a gay person was like, "Wow, that blows my mind." That was really exciting to me as well. Oliver Sacks spent the majority of his life hiding his sexual identity and in the closet. This felt like an opportunity to have an out, proud gay lead at the center.

We work really closely with Kate Edgar, who runs the Oliver Sacks estate. She said to me on one of our very first Zooms, she said she spent a lot of her life trying to find-- Yes, she was his ghost writer, his editor, she helped him publish many of his books, but she also was his friend. She always wanted to help him find a safe place in the world where he could be himself. In a weird way, she says that Brilliant Minds feels like that safe space today. That's just a nice way to think about it, like what could have been.

I feel like a lot of him hiding who he was was protecting his work and his career because back then, it would have had an effect on things. I think we live in a different world now, and we've come a long way, but we're not all the way there yet. I think Brilliant Minds is hopefully a step in that right direction.

Emily Silverman: What about you, Daniella? What drew you to this material?

Daniela Lamas: First of all, we won't go back and forth with compliments, but the ability to work with somebody who felt that way about the potential of a network TV

medical drama, that's amazing. It's very, very cool. The idea of giving Oliver Sacks this second life that he won't see, but could have been, is also extremely cool. From the medicine standpoint, look, there's something very bold. Anybody who's a neurologist listening, I think, wouldn't disagree. Neurology does not readily lend itself to network television.

Emily Silverman: Very cerebral.

Daniela Lamas: Very cerebral. Pun may be intended. They what? They find a lesion. They correlate it to your physical exam. Sometimes you have steroids, and sometimes you have a referral to repeat. I don't know. I, obviously, despite working on the show, have a limited view of neurology, but no, they have a ton of cool diagnoses, also, most of which you can do very little about. That's fascinating. How do you make a network show like that? Because that's actually most of medicine. We understand what's wrong, and then the person who piddles along.

In the stories that we tell on television, there is this essential view that if a story doesn't end with the way we traditionally define success, which is, you're all better, you're the same as you were, maybe even better than you ever were before, go continue on with your life, then it's a failure. Those of us working in hospitals, we understand that that's not actually a metric of success. It's not a realistic metric. People are always different, but it matters that those are the stories people see on television. In a subconscious way, it matters.

The idea of having an opportunity to tell stories that have a different ending, and draw the curtain close after the person makes the tremendous save, was very exciting to me, and remains very exciting to me. It's an interesting puzzle. Fooling people, but how do you make these stories seem cool and network TV exciting? How do you meet the demands for twists and turns while also being genuine to the arc of a story, keeping it in the way that I define now as realistic, which is, how do you keep it feeling true? Even if you're speeding time, obviously, because otherwise you're just monitoring labs for 42 minutes. How do you keep it feeling true?

I think when I watched the pilot of Brilliant Minds, I felt like, "Hey, this hospital feels real. It has a vibe that's real." God, you watch some of these pilots, and these are clearly hospitals. I'm not knocking other medical shows. Not specifically, that is, just in general. Feels like hospitals that are created by people who saw hospitals on television. This hospital feels real, the characters feel real, and the stories feel real. We've had an opportunity to tell really, really cool stories.

I think, in the setting of working on this show, and then also just a couple of patient encounters I had at the same time, I've become really interested in how a lot of our goals of care conversations and things like this are influenced by, for lack of a better term, a ableism in the medical profession where we say, "Ah, just can't imagine how this person with advanced MS could possibly want a trach. We recommend against this thing? How could they want this thing? Oh, God, they want this thing. We must not have explained correctly how bad it would be." I think stories that have people continue beyond the event that has made them different is an important counterfactual to that.

Emily Silverman: What you're saying about the show, and what I saw reflected in the episodes that I watched, was exactly that. It was not a hunt for a diagnosis or a Sherlock Holmes mystery, but questions about what it's like to live with a different kind of brain. It reminded me of this play that I saw in San Francisco a couple of years back, there was a playwright who was an artist in residence at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. His name is Jake Broder. Hi, Jake.

Jake wrote this beautiful play about a woman named Anne who started having these bizarre symptoms. She was a scientist and had always been at the microscope and a very concrete thinker. Suddenly, she was painting, and painting. She was making these paintings of strawberries, dozens and dozens of paintings of strawberries. Her husband was like, "What is wrong with you? You've never painted in your life, and you're a middle-aged woman now, suddenly you can't stop painting."

She quit her job. Her personality started changing. At first, he thought maybe she was having an affair, and then maybe he thought she was having a midlife crisis. Then gradually it became clear that these were symptoms of an evolving dementia. I believe it was frontotemporal dementia. What the play really showcased was that, yes, FTD is a horrible disease, and it's tragic, and it takes so much from us, but in her, ironically, it unlocked all of this artistic creativity. She went on, actually, to have a bit of a career as a painter in the twilight of her life.

Then one of the paintings that she made was a visual representation of a piece of classical music that was called Bolero, which was by a composer, Maurice Ravel. She was just obsessed with this piece of music. It was a repetitive phrase of music that just repeats again and again. In the painting, it was like every segment of the painting was a different repetition of this musical phrase.

Then, in retrospect, people found out that actually, that composer, Maurice Ravel, also suffered from the same type of dementia. In the play, they have him appearing almost like a ghost, and there's this cross-talk between him and her across time. They both have the same brain disease that's making them obsessed with certain ways of making art in this really repetitive way, but the art was beautiful and the piece of music is beautiful, and the painting is beautiful. It was just complicating this idea that disease is all bad, et cetera.

That came through in the series as well. I remember there was one case that I watched about somebody who had a brain tumor, and they were going to remove the tumor, but it was going to alter the way that he stored memories. Then there was some things about, like, "Okay, well, if that's going to be your new way of living in the world, what are some ways we can think about being more present?" Things like that.

Anyway, that's a very long story, but I just wanted to know if there were any particular patient stories or cases in the series that were your favorite, or that stood out, or that exemplified that idea of it's not about solving a mystery, it's about adapting.

Michael Grassi: Emily, I love that anecdote, and I love hearing about that and how it made you think of the show, because we often think about Brilliant Minds as, yes, we're a medical drama, yes, we are, in part, a medical procedural, but we really do think of ourselves as an emotional procedural first and foremost. We try to think about, what are stories about the human condition? When we're talking about the medical we're really talking about, what does this mean to our patient, and like Daniela said earlier, what is true? Hearing that, it's really, really interesting.

I love so many of our cases from Season 1 and upcoming cases in Season 2, but one of the cases I love from Season 1 is a really simple one, and it's inspired by a real Oliver Sacks case of the colorblind painter. If you are an artist who's used to seeing the world and depicting the world a certain way, what happens if you lose that ability to communicate and express your emotion through color? How do you adapt when the world suddenly doesn't look like the way it used to look before? What does that mean to our patient?

It was a case that I found very moving and a very good example of adaptation and how a loss can maybe be a gain in some ways. How do you help a patient adapt and reframe a diagnosis? That's one of the ones I think about. Daniella, what's one of yours? I'm curious.

Daniela Lamas: Sure. First of all, that's an amazing anecdote. I've been obsessed with that, not knowing the play, which now I have to find out about. I'm obsessed with that fact about frontal temporal dementia. What's pathology, and what is the real person versus disease? If the painting is seen as pathology, we see it as something different. That's just very interesting to me. There are many cases I was really excited about. I'll use as an example to show how this show is different. The longer-term story about a patient with locked-in syndrome was amazing to me to be able to tell a story about somebody locked-in. Again, doesn't necessarily lend itself to network television.

What I think we were able to do in that story is to-- I think when you're telling stories about people adapting and saying, "Well, there's this great way you can exist in the world, even though it's different," there's a risk to going too far, like being like, "It's okay, everybody can adapt to any sort of horrible circumstance. If you can't, well, clearly, you just haven't had a doctor who's as much of a cheerleader as Wolf." In this case, I think we really pushed against that and said that people can also choose not to. There is also a legitimate choice to say, "I see the way life can be. I am going to choose not to adapt to that."

That as doctors, and this is really hard for us, I imagine for you as well, the realization that I have over time again and again, that my job is not actually to make the person conform to what I think they should do, but actually to make sure that they understand, to the extent to which these things are imaginable, which they're really not. The extent to which they can, understand what is possible in the future and then support them in making the decision that's the best for them, even if it's not the decision I'd make for myself and for the people I love.

I think like pushing our characters to do that and ultimately making a decision that wasn't, in my mind, the way a TV decision would usually go-- We would say, "Oh, you're locked in and you found the love of your life. You can go be locked in and love each other together and maybe find a cure." That, I thought, was a pretty powerful example of what was possible in the show.

Emily Silverman: It is such a fine line, isn't it? Adapting versus romanticizing?

Daniela Lamas: Yes, and that's a risk. Whichever you where you go, it's a risk. For people seeing both sides, people working in hospitals-- I think we generally go too much on the other side, so I think it's more than okay to swing somewhat, but then to also offer stories to say, "There's still choice."

Michael Grassi: In that choice, how do you find the hope, and how is giving a patient agency in their care a hopeful story? I think that that's what was interesting about that arc, and Episode 107 was balancing that. Because at the end of the day, you do want to leave audiences feeling hope. That is a big part of what Oliver Sacks did, and that's our North Star every step of the way.

[music]

Emily Silverman: I want to ask about writing for and working with Zachary Quinto. I first came across him in the Star Trek movie, and I fell in love with him. He's just so charismatic and so complex and so perfect for this role. Very handsome, of course, also. I was just wondering about the casting process and what it's like to write for him and to work with him. He's incredibly talented.

Michael Grassi: Zach is the best. Just to go back and give you the origin story, I wrote the pilot for this, and we got a green light, but it was cast contingent, which is terrifying. You're never popping the champagne in this business. It's like, "Okay, well, we finally got the green light, but it's cast contingent. Okay, well, don't even ice the champagne yet." Zachary was our first and only choice for this, and he was the first person that we sent the script to. We hopped on a Zoom with him, and from that very first meeting, began one of the greatest collaborations, or if not the greatest collaboration, of my career thus far.

What's interesting when you attach an actor like Zachary Quinto to a project like this, he's not necessarily auditioning, and I hadn't heard him read for it yet. I'll never forget this, but we were sitting in the very first table read of the pilot. From the very first lines, I remember, my body completely relaxing and being like, "We're in the absolute best hands. Dr Oliver Wolf is in the absolute best hands."

I think what's been interesting about the process is, when you have an actor like Zachary take on a role like this, he inspires us. He inspires all of us in the room, so we get to write to Zachary. He brings so much wit to this, and so much curiosity and joy. We love writing for him and to him. His chemistry with the ensemble is so special. We love all of those relationships, particular with Carol, who's played by Tamberla Perry. We love Zachary, and it's an honor to get to work with him, truly, and it's fun, and he's very passionate, and wouldn't have it any other way. We're very lucky to have him as our number one.

Daniela Lamas: I think the only thought is that explaining medicine to actors who care about it is really cool. It's so cool to, if there's a question from the set, like, "Oh, he's wondering at this moment, why would I say this here?" Like, "Oh, you'd say this because of this." Like, "Oh, okay." He really cares about being genuine to his character and making sure those medical decisions track from episode to episode, which I think is fantastic. It makes sense, but it's fascinating the extent to which the actors will develop a sense of what they would do medically.

I've played in my mind with the idea of bringing the writers' room to rounds and seeing-- I suspect, they could run rounds just as well as I do. It's the medical ICU. We monitor PM labs, but thinking about these actors on rounds as well. I think that they would bring their same self to it and make medical decisions that are in keeping with their characters. It's just very cool to think about.

Emily Silverman: Do you get, Daniella, to go to the set and interact with the actors as a writer?

Daniela Lamas: Yes. The way Michael does it is that writers are always on set to uphold the integrity of the script as it's been generated in the room, and just to be present to answer questions. My schedule has been confused. A little ICU and I got a baby, but yes, I was on set last season and will be this season. It's so cool. It's like a hospital. A hospital set is an extremely, extremely cool thing if you're used to being in a hospital. People wear scrubs. It's really funny. It's a total kick out of it.

Emily Silverman: You have Season 1. Season 1 is out, and now it sounds like you're in the process of finishing up writing Season 2, or where are you in Season 2?

Michael Grassi: Good question, Emily. We're a network drama, which means we are writing, prepping, shooting, editing all at once. Multiple balls in the air, which requires an incredible team, which Daniela is here right now, and there are many more people who are a part of it. We are currently breaking Episode 209 in the room. We're shooting our Halloween episode, our very first Halloween, Episode 206, and editing for. All of the balls are in the air.

Emily Silverman: When you're in the writers' room, coming up with story arcs for an episode or for a season, are you exclusively drawing from Sacks's writing, like everything is loosely based on a real case, a real patient, or is it a mix? Do you make up some of the stories, or how does that work?

Michael Grassi: A mix. From the beginning, we were always like, we have this incredible trove of real-life cases that Oliver Sacks wrote about. We also have his real life, but we always take them and bring them into 2025, and also are inspired by other real-life cases that we bring to the room that we're excited about.

Daniela Lamas: This season, we have another doctor who's in the room, full-time as emergency medicine doctor, Ryan, who's awesome. He's also bringing his own true stories to the room. There's a lot of different ways that medical stories get in there.

Emily Silverman: Daniella, what is it like for you to toggle between a fake hospital and a real hospital, and between the heightened drama of writing for the show and a very different type of heightened drama of being in the ICU? Do you ever get whiplash going from one to the other, or do you feel like they transition back and forth pretty seamlessly, and they feed each other? What is it like to be living it's almost like a double life?

Daniela Lamas: I think I've, for various reasons, been really attracted to the idea of living double lives. I wanted to say thank you to that, but I was like, "That's not necessarily a compliment." Look, there's something inherently weird about finishing rounds and being like, "Okay, I'm going to go and join Zoom to see if there's a fictional patient I can manage and the units in fine hands." It's a little weird, but it's also fine. People go to their research labs. Now, I'm justifying the way I use my time.

I think mostly it is a very positive thing. Thinking about certain cases I had last season- last season, I say, like I had a season in the ICU- certain ICU cases I had during the last season of the show would very directly impact the kinds of things that I would pitch, or the language I would choose to use around something. I think that these things really do influence each other in a positive way. Then it's really easy to see the way in which being in a hospital frequently lends itself to pitches in the room.

I think it actually impacts itself positively in the other direction, too. I do think, as you understand very well, that thinking about the story and thinking about the way we build narrative around illness, that also makes you better in the hospital setting. I think that it goes both ways. Now, as I said, there's another doctor there, but there were more occasions last season where, occasionally, I would get a text with an actually urgent question about a fictional patient while I was on rounds, and that's funny. That's a funny moment. It's fine. It's fine to step off [unintelligible 00:33:20], but if it's fine.

Emily Silverman: What about reception of the show? I don't know, any colleagues or friends or people in your family, or random audience members, what has the response been?

Daniela Lamas: From the hospital setting, people are into the show. The medical ICU nurses have to watch whatever I'm part of because it'll be awkward otherwise, and because I know they watch Grey's Anatomy, so like, "Come on, guys."

Emily Silverman: Is Grey still on?

Daniela Lamas: Yes, it's still on.

Emily Silverman: Oh, my God.

Daniela Lamas: You're pretending ignorance. Come on. No, I'm kidding.

Emily Silverman: No, I really didn't know. I remember watching it in my freshman dorm room.

Daniela Lamas: It's still going. I think people are still watching it in their freshman dorm rooms. No, I think that when the nurses-- I feel like they're a much better gauge. When the nurses like something, it feels like, "Oh, this must have felt real." That's a good reception. Obviously, my parents--

Michael Grassi: Danielle, that's such a good point, that nurses are a good gauge. We have an incredible nurse, Megan, who's on set full-time and prepping all of the episodes, and she is such a good barometer for us. When she's on set and we're blocking a scene, if she's crying during the blocking, we know we're in a good place. That's always a helpful gauge. Reception has been great.

From the beginning, it was exciting to put out a show where we were able to find opportunities for diversity in multiple ways. What was exciting was for people to be able to come to the show and maybe find themselves in it, whether through a patient experience, or maybe something their family went through, or potentially through one of our doctors, and what they're experiencing.

The best feedback that we got were when people were able to see themselves or able to see themselves represented in a way that they hadn't seen before. I felt like was some of the most exciting feedback. One of the things, often, was that we were a comforting, hopeful place to go to every week. That was one of the things from-- By design, I really wanted to create a medical drama that delivered on all of the comforts that we've grown to love about medical dramas, but trying to deliver it through a brand new lens that we hadn't really seen before.

This is our lens, and I think we always come back to this in the room when we're breaking any story, but it's, we really think about mental health. We really think about Oliver Sacks, who dedicated his life to de-stigmatizing mental health, taking conditions of the mind that were perhaps scary or never talked about, and making them accessible, and telling a story. I think following that North Star has been a really satisfying path in terms of setting us apart from other medical dramas. The best feedback we get is that there's hope and comfort in that. If that makes sense.

Emily Silverman: That's awesome. Well, thank you so much, both of you, for coming on the show to talk about your show. Maybe you can let the audience know where can they find you? Where can they find your work, also your work, Daniela, your writing, and all of that, and where can they find the show?

Daniela Lamas: No, you tell when the show is. I'm bad at knowing when things are.

Michael Grassi: Season 2 premieres September 22 on NBC, at 10:00 after The Voice. We drop the next day on Peacock. You can catch up on Season 1 right now on Peacock. It's all available.

Emily Silverman: Daniela, where can we find your work? You have a book, you have essays, you have a lot. Where can we find you?

Daniela Lamas: The essays that I write most are in The New York Times, theoretically once a month, but in reality, sometimes once a month, so in The Times' opinion section, awesome.

Emily Silverman: Michael and Daniella, thank you again for coming on the show to talk about Brilliant Minds. So much fun to chat.

Daniela Lamas: Thank you.

Michael Grassi: Thank you. Nice to meet you.

Daniela Lamas: It was great.

[music]

Emily Silverman: This episode of The Nocturnists was produced by me and producer and head of story development Molly Rose-Williams. Our executive producer is Ali Block, and Ashley Pettit is our program director. Original theme music was composed by Yosef Munro, and additional music comes from Blue Dot Sessions. The Nocturnists is made possible by the California Medical Association, a physician-led organization that works to ensure the doctor-patient relationship remains at the center of medicine. To learn more about the CMA, visit cmadocs.org.

This episode of The Nocturnists Conversations is sponsored by the Physicians Foundation, which supports physician well being, practice sustainability, and leadership in delivering high-quality, cost-efficient care. The Nocturnists is also made possible by donations from listeners like you. In fact, we recently moved over to Substack, which makes it easier than ever to support our work directly by joining us with a donation of $2, $5, or $10 a month, you'll become an essential part of our creative community. I'm your host, Emily Silverman. See you next week.