TED SARANDOS
CO-CEO, NE TFLIX
TED SARANDOS STEPPED OFF AN ELECTRIC golf cart in the Albuquerque summer heat, ducked into a state-of-the-art soundstage, and entered another world.
“Looks just like a hospital,” he said as a production assistant guided him past wheelchairs and a mannequin strapped to a gurney. This was the set of Pulse, a new original series that unfolds in Miami's busiest Level 1 trauma center, and as word spread that the boss had arrived, co-showrunner Carlton Cuse emerged from what looked like an operating room and shook Sarandos's hand.
“That's a cut!” someone yelled, as Cuse, best known as a showrunner on ABC's Lost, began a tour of Pulse’s faux hospital, featuring a two-story entryway, full-on emergency room, scrub-in area, and long hallways where actors could perform “walk and talk” scenes without running into a wall.
Pulse, set to debut next year, is Netflix's first medical procedural, or “case of the week” show. Along with crime shows like Law & Order, medical procedurals have long been the bread and butter of traditional TV. Viewers love them because they reliably deliver on an expected formula (and can be watched out of order). And they cost less to make than serialized, prestige dramas.
“What you really hope,” Sarandos said as he traversed the expanded Netflix Studios Albuquerque—12 soundstages on 108 acres, with a solar array and battery storage system, geothermal heating and cooling, and 50 electric vehicle fast chargers—is that Pulse “is a long-running show so all this investment makes more sense.”
Studio lot? OG showrunner? Longrunning medical procedural? Was this 2024, or 1994, the year that NBC's made George Clooney a star? It seemed Netflix had spent more than a decade disrupting the linear television business only to … replicate the linear television business. Lately, the streaming leader had begun venturing into more areas that once defined old-fashioned TV: live event programming, sports, and even advertising. You could call these events ironic. Over its 27-year history, the company had innovated in truly novel ways: DVDs by mail, streaming at scale, an algorithmic version of the traditional “channel guide,” becoming the world's first and only truly global entertainment platform. But was this the ultimate innovation: returning, triumphantly, to where TV began? I asked Sarandos whether Net flix had succeeded in part by infiltrating Hollywood, Trojanhorselike, as a tech-driven curiosity— then slaughtering its
