When Netflix announced it was green-lighting Pulse back in February 2024, the streaming giant made a big deal of the fact that the soapy drama was going to be its first medical procedural. The emailed press release even mentioned that fact before getting to the show’s cast and creators, and reporting from the Hollywood trades made it clear Netflix execs hoped to create their own version of Grey’s Anatomy. The narrative: This was another big swing for a platform used to shattering old paradigms.

It wasn’t meant to be. Last week, with most of the industry away for the long holiday weekend, Netflix quietly confirmed it was pulling the plug on Pulse. It wasn’t a particularly surprising development, given the series never managed to break the billion-minute mark on Nielsen’s weekly list of most-watched streaming shows and disappeared from the charts after just two weeks, even with a hefty-for-Netflix ten-episode season. Reviews were also decidedly mixed. And at the same time the streamer said it was ending Pulse, it confirmed it was also walking away from the Shonda Rhimes–produced The Residence, which premiered around the same time, had a much better-known cast, and performed far better in Nielsen’s public-facing numbers. The bar to getting a second season on Netflix is high these days, and it’s hard to argue Pulse was able to capture a big enough audience to justify one on the world’s biggest subscription streamer.

But while the decision to move on from Pulse may have been justified by the data, there’s a bigger lesson here than “sometimes shows just don’t work out.” In this case, Netflix’s dogmatic approach to how it produces and releases scripted shows, as well as its arrogance about the power of its own platform, contributed significantly to Pulse’s failure to find a large enough audience and the streamer’s failure to successfully launch its first medical procedural. Looking back, Netflix made three big mistakes:

➼ It released all ten episodes of season one at once.

Look, I’m as tired about the “debate” over weekly versus binge as anyone else, especially when it comes to Netflix, which has proved time and again that its subscribers love to gorge on content. But by the streamer’s own admission, Pulse was something it hadn’t done before, a medical procedural. It wasn’t the usual eight- or ten-episode movie–as–TV show Netflix has perfected, with a propulsive narrative that all but insists the viewer keep consuming episode after episode (like Department Q, a brilliant thriller I downed in a single sitting this weekend). Instead, while there was a serialized romance, the medical drama on Pulse largely reset each episode once the initial hurricane plotline played out a few hours in. It was very much a network-style TV show, and as such, it absolutely could have benefited from a release pattern in which audience members were invited to spend months, rather than hours, with the show.

You’re absolutely doing a disservice to the show.

And yes, this is where I’m going to mention The Pitt. The main reason Max’s show was a ratings hit, just got nominated for multiple Television Critics Association awards, and is expected to clean up at the Emmy nominations next week is because it’s really, really good. It also helped that it boasts both the creative geniuses behind ER and one of its stars. But talk to Pitt co-creator John Wells or anyone at HBO Max, and they will readily tell you that releasing new episodes every week also mattered — a lot. Anyone who watched the wave of social-media interest in The Pitt grow last winter could see it with their own eyes: Every Thursday and Friday, platforms like Occupied Twitter and BlueSky were filled with posts expressing their love for the series and its characters and the “They did what?” story lines. It didn’t have the Netflix algorithm, but it did have social-media algos funneling positive reactions to the show into people’s feeds for nearly four months. Netflix shows can do the same thing even with a binge model — but Pulse simply isn’t the same kind of big, showy event series as a Wednesday or Squid Game or even Department Q. It’s more routine, and as such, it might have had a better shot of connecting had Netflix tried to make it part of viewers’s weekly routines. As one exec with years of experience at both linear and streaming platforms told me, by binge releasing an episodic procedural, “You’re absolutely doing a disservice to the show.”

➼ The scheduling of Pulse’s launch date turned out to be a disaster.

While no doubt the show’s March release was penciled in long before anyone at the streamer knew just how big The Pitt would be, once the first rapturous reviews started coming right after New Year’s, it should have been obvious the Max Original was, at the very least, going to grab the media’s attention for the next few months. Not only that, but by January, Netflix could see that Fox was about to mount a major push for its own new medical drama (Doc), while ABC and NBC would be rolling out new episodes of their long-running hits Grey’s and Chicago Med.

Normally Netflix really doesn’t have to worry about what anyone else is doing, particularly those poor old broadcast networks. But again, this kind of show is not its kind of show, and while the streamer has proven time and again that it can reinvent just about any genre and make it work for its platform, debuting a new medical procedural weeks after two other high-profile new shows in the same genre meant there was little oxygen left in the Zeitgeist for Pulse. As one industry veteran told me this week, you never want to be third or fourth into the market with a new product. So if it wasn’t possible for Pulse to premiere in January, Netflix should have considered pushing back its premiere to the summer or fall, when the competition from other similar shows wouldn’t be as intense.

➼ It didn’t order enough episodes.

Yes, Pulse was given a longer run — ten hours — than the typical Netflix drama, which these days forces audiences to live with six- or eight-episode seasons. But much the same way The Pitt benefited from a weekly rollout, it helped that audiences were given a whopping (by 2025 standards) 15 episodes in season one. Those extra episodes made it easier to establish a bond with the audience while also giving writers more time to flesh out story lines for a large ensemble cast, to experiment with different kinds of episodes and plotlines, and to better learn how to play to their cast’s strengths.

To be sure, Wells and the Pitt crew made a supersize episode count work for streaming by keeping costs way down, something Netflix shows aren’t known for doing all that well. I don’t know the budget for Pulse, but it sure didn’t look inexpensive (there were many location shoots, with filming in Miami), so even though it was surely more economical than many streaming series, it probably wasn’t anywhere near as efficient as The Pitt. But given the co-showrunner on Pulse was the broadcast vet Carlton Cuse, I’m pretty sure he and creator Zoe Robyn could have figured out how to make a more cost-efficient version of their series in exchange for more episodes — had Netflix made that a priority. But that would have meant emulating the linear-TV playbook, something the streamer seems loath to do with scripted series.

Will Netflix Learn From Its Mistakes?

What’s so frustrating about Netflix’s stubbornness about how it makes and launches scripted shows is that, in so many other areas, the streamer has proven to be pretty flexible about breaking its own rules. For years, execs were completely against including advertising on the platform … until they weren’t. They encouraged members to share their passwords with friends and family … until they didn’t. And Netflix bemoaned the billions that legacy networks spent on the NFL and other sports … until it, too, started writing checks to the NFL and WWE. One industry wag says he thinks Pulse will end up being the start of the learning curve for the streamer when it comes to procedurals. I’m not willing to get my hopes up for Netflix finally doing a weekly release for a U.S. scripted original, but maybe the next time it attempts an episodic procedural, it’ll follow the John Wells example and keep the budget modest. It would then make financial sense to give that show a 16-episode commitment, releasing it in two batches of eight episodes within a single year.

After all, Netflix has shown some willingness to bend when it comes to the binge-drop model. Reality shows like this week’s (very good) Building the Band roll out over three or four weeks with mini-batches of episodes, while Netflix now regularly divides seasons of its biggest hits into two parts spaced a few weeks apart, like the upcoming sophomore installment of Wednesday. Plus, when Netflix had an output deal with the CW to stream the network’s shows internationally, it would often debut new episodes weekly. And next year, Netflix France will start distributing that country’s biggest linear network, streaming its shows both live and on-demand, meaning subscribers will be getting a ton of French procedurals that roll out on a weekly basis.

So why not try to do the same thing with the next Pulse? Yes, plenty of people catch up with procedurals like Grey’s Anatomy via binges. Netflix has also succeeded by dropping full seasons of network procedurals it saved from cancellation, as with the final three seasons of former Fox drama Lucifer. But the difference there was that these shows had established audiences and deep catalogues with dozens of episodes, allowing folks who missed the show’s network run to spend weeks diving into a new-for-them series. With Pulse, Netflix simply released ten episodes of a completely unknown show without huge stars and expected viewers to become instantly hooked.

Could it have happened? Given Netflix’s track record, had Pulse gotten the sort of reviews The Pitt had and featured a lead as beloved as Noah Wyle … maybe. But The Pitt still took some time before it landed in Nielsen’s top ten and clearly established itself as a hit. As good as it was, it might not have found the audience it did had it simply released ten or even 15 episodes one day in January. At the very least, having episodes debut every week did not hurt the show — and I don’t think it would’ve hurt Pulse, either. Quite the opposite.

 What Netflix got wrong with its first medical procedural.