Pulse

Contrary to what Hussain Dalal might have you believe, there is an art to writing bad television. A bad show owns its contrivances instead of making excuses for them; a bad show embraces its heightened drama without pretending that it wants to be taken seriously. It scoffs in the face of concepts such as internal logic and organic character development. It chooses twists over tact, and chaos over narrative control. But what makes a bad show good? It all boils down to an indescribable self-awareness. And while Netflix’s medical drama Pulse checks all the above boxes — it’s trash TV of the topmost order — it never fully commits to the cause. Pulse is bad in the traditional sense of the word, in that it’s utterly incoherent, laughably plotted, and contains such a shocking depiction of sexual harassment that you might momentarily be confused into thinking that Bollywood was somehow involved. Incidentally, Pulse happens to be star Willa Fitzgerald’s second anti-feminist project in a row, after the thriller film Strange Darling. Directed by JT Mollner, Strange Darling seemingly took offence at the indisputable fact that the serial killer genre is dominated by men. “Are you saying women can’t be serial killers?” the movie seemed to ask. “How dare you; now watch this.”