SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from Monday night’s episode of NBC‘s Brilliant Minds.
Eric Dane made a guest appearance on NBC’s Brilliant Minds for a heartfelt and personal episode in which he plays a firefighter grappling with an amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) diagnosis.
The Thanksgiving episode of the medical drama comes about four months after the 53-year-old actor revealed his own ALS diagnosis in April. In it, his character Matthew refuses to tell his family about his ALS, a progressive illness that causes loss of muscle control. Over the course of the episode, the doctors at Bronx General manage to convince him that he’s better off leaning on his village than trying to navigate this on his own.
Showrunner Michael Grassi tells Deadline that the storyline was born out of a phone call from Dane’s team, who reached out to say he was a fan of the show and wanted to be part of it.
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“I was so excited by the opportunity to tell a story with him and what he’s currently dealing with,” Grassi said. “So Eric and I had a series of conversations, and funny enough, our first Zoom, I had to fly home for a family emergency with a family member dealing with a difficult diagnosis, and I Zoomed from that family member’s house, and I remember our conversations very quickly started circling this very simple idea of what is it like for a family to navigate a difficult diagnosis.”
While the episode is built around Matthew’s arc, those themes about how to navigate a difficult diagnosis and how to learn to ask for help from the people around you resonate for all of the characters this week as Wolf (Zachary Quinto) continues to grapple with losing his father again and Ericka (Ashleigh LaThrop) tries to help Sam (Nabil Rajo) get on the transplant list after he goes into liver failure.
In the interview below, Grassi unpacks the episode.
DEADLINE: This is quite an emotional episode, especially given Eric’s real-life diagnosis. How did you develop this storyline and when did Eric’s involvement come to fruition?
MICHAEL GRASSI: So I think it was like September, maybe, Eric’s team reached out to us, and they said he was a fan of the show and wanted to be a part of Brilliant Minds. Katie, I am a huge Eric Dane fan. So when I heard he wanted to be on Brilliant Minds, I was so excited by the opportunity to tell a story with him and what he’s currently dealing with. So Eric and I had a series of conversations, and funny enough, our first Zoom, I had to fly home for a family emergency with a family member dealing with a difficult diagnosis, and I Zoomed from that family member’s house, and I remember our conversations very quickly started circling this very simple idea of what is it like for a family to navigate a difficult diagnosis. There’s no rule book. There’s no guide. There’s no right way. There’s no wrong way, and it’s really hard. So we just wanted to show, especially for our Thanksgiving episode, what is it like for a family to have to work through this together? The other big piece of it is we talked about this character, Matthew, who’s a firefighter, somebody who has dedicated his life to helping others and to saving other people, and when that is your whole sense of being and purpose, what is it like to have to let people in [and] accept help? I think that’s the hardest thing for this character of Matthew, and I think it’s hard for a lot of people to accept help.
So while this story is specific to ALS and Matthew’s condition, it’s also universal in many ways. So those are all sort of some of the big themes that we were excited to talk about. The last thing we were excited to explore was this idea of, on our show, we talk about adaptation a lot, and we talk about how people adapt. One of the things about ALS that is difficult for a lot of patients is the adaptation never stops. So if someone has, let’s say, a spine injury and they go through surgery, you adapt to that, and you can potentially move forward from there. But I think something like ALS, once you adapt, something changes again, and you’re adapting again and then adapting again and adapting again. That is not easy by any means, because you’re always doing something new. So those are all things that we talked about early on that we were interested in exploring in this episode.
DEADLINE: What was born from some of those conversations in terms of what he might want to bring to this character that reflected his own experience with ALS?
GRASSI: So, I think from day one, Eric and I were on the same page in the sense that we wanted to tell not a story about a diagnosis, in the sense that, like, it’s a medical mystery, [and] we have to figure out what’s wrong. We wanted to tell a story about somebody who has already been diagnosed and who comes into our hospital and has a relationship, and, strangely, since everyone at the hospital knows about Matthew’s condition, that’s a safe space. That’s a space where he can be himself, and he has relationships with Dr. Pierce and Nurse Silva and Wolf and Dr Dang, because they’re all someone he can be open with at the time. We want to meet Eric where he is, and we want to tell an honest story, and we wanted to meet him and his story in terms of where he [was] that day…when you’re dealing with a progressive illness, sometimes stuff changes every day. So we just really wanted to be open and collaborative and keep the conversation going every day. The best part of the process, was working with Eric and making sure that he felt great, and we felt great. He was just so generous on set, and it was a really good time getting to work with him.
DEADLINE: This whole episode has themes of learning to lean on others and accept help. We see that with Sam, and we even see that with Wolf. Once you knew Eric was on board, how did you start to weave together this episode so these season-long arcs could converge with Matthew’s story in that way?
GRASSI: So when we heard Eric going to the show, I was looking at the board and our episodes and our air dates, and I was like, Eric, can do the show. Thanksgiving episode is coming up. Thanksgiving episodes always lend themselves to this idea of family, which is always great, and I think for each of our characters, for Matthew, for Sam, our schizophrenic patient who’s has been a serialized patient this season, and even for someone like Wolf, you can’t do it alone. I think for someone like Sam, alone means death. You have to have a strong support system in order to get a liver transplant. For something progressive like ALS, you need a support system as well to continue forward. Even someone like Wolf, he has to learn to let people in as well. So I think that theme of needing people and being open to that was was something that clicked into place and felt very satisfying and universal for this episode.
DEADLINE: Wolf has solved some pretty incredible cases, but it’s also interesting to see him be confronted more with cases he can’t really fix, like with Matthew and with Sam. How do you think about the ways that affects the characters, especially Wolf’s interns, when they start to realize they will not always be able to pull off these medical miracles?
GRASSI: You’re touching on something that was very much baked into the original conceit and pitch of this show, which is inspired by Oliver Sacks. A lot of neurological conditions don’t have a fix. They don’t have an easy solve. While that is something that Dr. Wolf knows, I don’t think it makes it any easier, because you’re dealing with the people who are processing this and grappling with this idea, which involves grief, because your life is changing, and you’re saying goodbye to something that you maybe no longer were able to do. So I think a big part of that is a word I used earlier, which is adaptation, and how do you move forward, and the incredible resilience. The show’s called Brilliant Minds, because the mind is incredible in terms of what people are willing to accept as their new normal. So I think if you could ask somebody, ‘What would you do if you had that?’ A lot of people would say, ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to live that way.’ But you can’t say that unless you are the person who is in it, because you’d be surprised when you’re actually living with it how much you are willing to adapt, and how much you’re willing to go forward in order to do the things that are important to you. So that that’s such a big piece of the show.
In terms of how it affects the interns, I think we really see that story reflected in Erica. Erica is so type A, and she needs Sam, and she wants to fix him. She really, really does. I think Wolf and Carol, who have a lot more experience with this, know what path she’s walking down, and they can see the heartbreak coming, but they also can’t over manage because they know she has to go through this, and she has to learn it, and this is a way to learn it. Sam, there’s no easy fix, and I love that we’re playing a schizophrenic patient who’s in our hospital and trying to get help in a way that doesn’t feel sensationalized and doesn’t feel like there’s a fix. I’ve seen some medical dramas in the past introduce a character who’s dealing with debilitating illness and then, ‘Oh, there’s a magical solve at the end.’ That’s not what we’re doing on Brilliant Minds. There’s no magical solve, but there is resilience and a way forward, as difficult as it is.
DEADLINE: I did love that they managed to find his family. Can you talk about if we will see more of Sam and what his story might look like from here now that he’s also suffering from liver failure?
GRASSI: We will see more of Sam. This was a story we were really passionate about early in the season, which is the reality of transplants is that, if you are struggling with a mental illness or with your mental health, you are deprioritized in the list, and sometimes don’t even make the list at all. So a conversation we’re having in the room is this idea of who deserves care [and] why? There are many reasons why. Maybe they won’t take care of themselves as well, therefore they won’t deserve a liver. But what our team is trying to prove is that Sam is somebody who deserves this and does deserve the care. What’s interesting is, you need a support system, right? So, Erica, does it. She finds his family, she brings them in, and they hear how hard it is to have to take care of Sam. Afterwards, they’re going to try to get a place in New York to take care of him, and that’s really hard on a lot of families that do all these things. Even still, when all of that’s presented to the transplant board, like in real life, the transplant board still rejects Sam. So I think we’re going to continue that story…and our doctors will be asking the question of, who deserves care? It’s interesting and very real medicine that we talked a lot about, especially with our doctor, Daniela Lamas, in the room, who’s written a lot about this as well.
DEADLINE: You’ve also got Mädchen Amick in this episode as Matthew’s wife. How did that casting come about?
GRASSI: I worked with Mädchen for many, many seasons on Riverdale. She also directed Episode 207 this season with our patient who was having musical hallucinations. So I asked her, ‘Mädchen, do you also want to come act in an episode?’ And I thought it was the perfect opportunity to have her play alongside Eric Dane and support the Matthew storyline, and be part of that complicated family dynamic. Mädchen’s so wonderful, and she’s so good in the episode. The scene that always gets me is when she’s buttoning his shirt. I also love her scene with Carol. She does amazing work in the episode.
DEADLINE: That scene at the end, when all of the firefighters and people he’s saved show up to his house is so touching as well.
GRASSI: It’s really beautiful. And his [voiceover] at the end of Act 6 was also really special. When we shot that scene, it was very emotional for many reasons, and the entire crew stood and clapped Eric out for about 10 minutes after he shot that, because it was just so incredible, and he was so good in it, and he moved us all. It was incredible.
Brilliant Minds airs Monday nights at 10 p.m. ET/PT on NBC.