TV Talk: Green Tree native Zachary Quinto is back in season 2 of ‘Brilliant Minds’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

This fall’s 10 p.m. Monday night broadcast schedule pits a Western Pa. native, Zachary Quinto, starring in NBC’s “Brilliant Minds,” against a Pittsburgh-set series, CBS’s “Watson” (debuting Oct. 13).

Both shows are medical dramas. Both explore medical mysteries with Quinto’s Dr. Oliver Wolf on “Brilliant Minds” focused on mental illness, while Dr. John Watson (Morris Chestnut) is a “doc-tective” who pursues mystery ailments that may occur throughout the body.

“If I’m honest, this is the first that I’m hearing about what we’re up against,” Quinto said in a Zoom interview on Sept. 22, the day “Brilliant Minds” had its second season premiere. “I don’t really pay attention to things like that. … I go and do what it is that I know how to do, and I try to do it to the best of my ability, and all that stuff is outside of my sphere of influence. I like to believe that there’s room for different kinds of stories.”

In the second season premiere of “Brilliant Minds,” Dr. Oliver Wolf (Green Tree native Quinto) was shocked when the father (Mandy Patinkin) he’d recently grown reacquainted with departed, leaving behind only a letter to say goodbye.

The same episode set up a flash-forward six months in the future that shows Wolf seemingly imprisoned in a mental hospital run by a sweet-voiced executive (Bellamy Young, “Scandal”).

Is Wolf’s hospitalization all about his daddy issues?

“Wolf is somebody, as we learned in season one, who has a lot of deeply rooted trauma and issues of trust and abandonment,” Quinto said. “He does a really good job of balancing them and managing them and integrating them to a certain extent, but as anybody who’s familiar with mental wellness can attest, even people who care for others sometimes struggle with their own journey. Obviously, that push and pull — like, I’m back, I’m gone — re-wounds a person, but I think there are other factors that we’re going to come to learn about that contribute to Wolf ending up in a place that he can’t get out of.”

“Brilliant Minds” wrapped its 13-episode first season in January, but NBC didn’t officially renew the show for a 20-episode second season until May. The show averaged 2.9 million linear viewers weekly, putting the show at No. 8 among NBC’s 15 scripted series during the 2024-25 TV season. Only one other series with lower ratings, “The Hunting Party,” got renewed and will return at midseason. The second season premiere of “Brilliant Minds” drew 2.2 million linear viewers, a series low.

Wolf’s father leaving abruptly wasn’t a foregone conclusion when the show’s first season wrapped. NBC’s delay in making a decision on renewing the show resulted in Patinkin becoming unavailable, at least for the beginning of season two.

“Part of the ongoing narrative of hour-long serialized storytelling is you have to be able to pivot and evolve with things that present themselves along the way,” Quinto said. “Mandy’s unavailability was one of those things that we had to suddenly reckon with. Now, whether or not he shows up later in the season … you never know what to expect later down the line, I’ll just say that.”

Unlike the show’s first season, which wrapped production before any episodes aired, production on season two will continue until March as episodes air on NBC. Quinto said they’ve filmed through episode seven and he’s set to direct episode 16.

“The writers are working hard on the second half of the season now,” Quinto said. “Things do change based on how they fit into a story and what audiences want to see. This year, we’ll have the experience of sharing the show with the audience while we’re still filming it. If there’s something that people really respond to, then the writers have the opportunity to write more toward that thing.”

Quinto said that with season one, he got the sense that viewers appreciate the balance between character exploration and medical cases and how those elements thread together.

“I got a lot of feedback that people saw themselves in our stories, whether that’s something that they themselves have gone through or something that they’ve dealt with with a loved one or a family member,” Quinto said. “That, to me, is the highest compliment that you can pay our show, because I feel like our goal is to tell stories that are obviously dynamic and entertaining but also that have an underlying sense of optimism and faith in humanity.”

On the character front, last season Wolf began a romantic relationship with arrogant Dr. Josh Nichols (Teddy Sears) but then put it on hold to deal with his father’s return.

“I think Wolf got overwhelmed by the intensity of emotion, and, compounded by the reappearance of his father, it was all a little bit too much, and he had to make a choice and he chose to pursue reconnecting with his father,” Quinto said. “Now we can see that maybe that wasn’t the best choice for him to make. There are certain developments at Bronx General that will significantly inform the dynamic between Wolf and Nichols in the course of the second season. They’re both adults, and they’re both supremely dedicated to their patients and to their work, so I think we’ll see a lot dancing around this very fine line and where it will lead them this season is still taking shape.”

Quinto said he hasn’t “been to Pittsburgh in a minute” but wants to make a return visit.

“My best friend from high school and college lives there with her kids, who are my godkids, and that’s always a reason to come back,” Quinto said. “I’ll have to put a trip on the books when I finish this season of the show.”