This article contains spoilers from Pulse season 1.

The creators of Pulse know they have a lot of medical shows to compete with, namely the one everyone seems to be talking about: Max’s The Pitt. “It’s hard to follow a lot of these shows and particularly The Pitt, which I think is really well done, but it is significantly different than our show,” co-showrunner Carlton Cuse tells Entertainment Weekly. “The Pitt is beautifully researched and executed. I think there’s room for different types of shows and we were much more interested in focusing on the character side of things. For us, it was really an exploration of what is it like to have a really intense personal relationship in a workplace.”

With Pulse, Cuse and co-showrunner Zoe Robyn deliver a story that’s about power dynamics more than it is necessarily about medicine. The series (out on Netflix now) kicks off when resident Danny Simms (Willa Fitzgerald) files a sexual harassment complaint against her chief resident (and ex-boyfriend) Xander Phillips (Colin Woodell).

“It came from a really personal place for me,” Robyn tells EW. “I was, at the time, in a relationship similar to the one Danny finds herself in. And I felt like I couldn’t really talk to anyone about it. I worried about what people would think if I told anyone, and I doubted my own sense of reality of what the relationship was. It was this sort of therapeutic practice to write the character of Danny and explore my own fears about the hypotheticals that could happen if I were to go public and tell anyone.”

Across its 10 episodes, Pulse gives viewers more and more backstory on the relationship between Danny and Xander. “The challenge of this show is: Can you show a relationship that both has love between these two people and also where the situation isn’t necessarily the most healthy?” Robyn says. “That power dynamic is always going to pose complications. It’s always going to make things difficult, especially for Danny, but also for Phillips, who has sort of genuine love and respect for Danny and doesn’t understand the position he’s putting her in because he hasn’t been there himself.”

Carlton adds, “We definitely didn’t want to do a gotcha story. That felt completely wrong to us. What we liked about this is, I think a lot of people’s primary sense of community now is their workplace. And what would it be like if I dated that person in my workplace? There’s complications in those decisions, and that’s what we wanted to show. It’s not like it was a bad decision or it was the wrong decision, it was just a complicated decision.”

In the end, Danny rescinds her complaint, Xander gets his promotion, and despite not getting the chief resident job, Danny heads into the ocean for a moment of peace, something she hasn’t gotten all season. “It was really important to us that it seemed like the right emotional ending for her,” Cuse says. “We talked a lot about the ending of The Way We Were, where Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand run into each other in front of the Plaza Hotel, and you really feel how connected these two people are, and yet they really can’t be together at that moment in time. That became sort of our North Star for where we wanted to go at the end of the season. And our hope is that we get to make Pulse for a long time and there will be other iterations of the Danny-Phillips relationship.”

Speaking to a potential season 2 and what they’d like to explore, Cuse says, “We definitely want to do more about Sophie (Chelsea Muirhead) and Camila (Daniela Nieves). And I’ve worked with Nestor [Carbonell] a lot on different shows that I’ve done, but I had no idea until we cast him that he and Justina [Machado] had been friends for like 25 years, so there’s this incredible connectivity between them.”

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Robyn feels similarly. “Justina Machado is so amazing, and I’m really excited personally to dive into her as a character separate from the Danny issue. I think we’re excited to go home with a few of the other characters and sort of round them out. There’s just so much, but I do think that we do plan to keep Danny and Phillips at the center of things and continue to explore that, because obviously there’s love there. We want for them to be together, and we want for them to finally get to that place.” She then adds with a laugh, “Maybe in seven or eight seasons.”

Pulse is out now on Netflix.