Ever since ER debuted 31 years ago, viewers have seen big city emergency rooms as malestroms of activity, with doctors, nurses, orderlies and other staff swarming around patients and rooms at all times. Imagine coming into this environment as the new leader of the department, having not had any experience with emergency medicine before. That’s the idea behind the new Apple series Berlin ER.
BERLIN ER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A guy in a hoodie gets high at a club, and we see lights and people swirl around him as he gets increasingly messed up.
The Gist: What we find out, as the man stumbles into the hospital and sees a man stop breathing by a stairwell is that he’s Dr. Ben Weber (Slavko Popadic), one of the ER docs at KRANK, one of the busiest and understaffed hospitals in Berlin, and he’s trying to sober up before his shift starts in a few hours.
One of the doctors who encounters him is Dr. Zanna Parker (Haley Louise Jones), who has been hired by Dr. Stephen Beck (Peter Lohmeyer), the hospital’s administrator, as the head of the emergency department. She was the head of geriatrics at a hospital in Munich, but what she’s walking into is going to be a whole lot different at KRANK. She realizes this when she finds out that she’s the fourth ER head who’s been hired this year alone. She also realizes what she’s gotten herself into when no one will even show her where the changing room is.
She finds Dr. Weber and he tells her to shadow him; she doesn’t tell him she’s the new ER head. Weber is still hungover, having intravenously consumed a hangover remedy concocted by his colleague and buddy, Dr. Kian Amini (Benjamin Radjaipour), and negotiating with his fellow attending, Dr. Emina Ertan (Safak Sengül), to take his hip surgery that day.
In the meantime, we see EMTs Olaf Hendel (Bernhard Schütz) and his trainee, Olivia Kropf (Samirah Breuer), are picking up a guy who got stabbed in the butt during a fight. He’s demanding in the ambulance, and when he’s brought in, Ertan takes the lead with Olivia and tells the guy he’ll need a colostomy bag, just to freak him out.
Parker’s presence as a leader is certainly not welcome, as we see when her name at the top of the board is replaced by things like “Fuck You”, and people are taking bets on how long she’ll last. But, there’s a reason why she left a relatively cushy job in Munich for what even its administrator calls the “worst hospital in Berlin.”
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Berlin ER is basically The Pitt, except a lot grungier.
Our Take: Berlin ER (Original title: KRANK Berlin), created by Viktor Jakovleski and Samuel Jefferson, is a pretty standard medical drama under all the music and camera tricks, with characters we’ve seen a million times on medical shows in the U.S. That doesn’t mean, however, that the show isn’t worth following.
Like most medical dramas, Berlin ER has a bit of a sardonic sense of humor, most of which is in the “if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry” category. Hundreds of patients come through KRANK in a day, and many of their cases push the doctors and nurses to the edge of patience and sanity. But it seems like Dr. Parker may be a match for an ER that feels almost as tired and rusty as the outside of the hospital building looks.
Jones, whom we last saw in Dear Child, can play the type of character that Dr. Parker needs to be: A person who has her own tricks up her sleeve, and who can scream into a paper towel and still go out there and do the work. Jones has good chemistry with Popadic, who plays the ever-hungover Dr. Weber, who seems to compensate for the stress of working at KRANK by self-medicating whenever he gets a chance. Parker already can see, just by working with him for a few hours, that he’s a good, caring doctor who has his own way of doing things. Even if he’s less than helpful, she knows the kind of asset he is in the ER’s pressure cooker.
We’d imagine the rest of the season will be spent seeing Parker prove her worth and steel herself for some of the tragedies she’s going to see, like when a frequent-flyer patient who has nothing wrong with her throws herself at Olaf and Olivia’s ambulance, in front of her young son, after Parker throws her out of the ER. We’ll also likely see how Weber manages to balance his partying with his job without killing himself or his patients.
Speaking of Olaf and Olivia: Their story feels somewhat superfluous, given that we could build a whole show around EMTs. But perhaps we’ll see them connect with the ER personnel more as the season goes along.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: When her shift is over, Dr. Parker scratches her name into the board where everyone has erased her name and put up joke names and phrases, then she leaves. Her message is she’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Sleeper Star: Safak Sengül gives Dr. Emina Ertan the proper DGAF attitude that allows her to scream in the face of Parker when Parker decides her patient should go to surgery before Ertan’s patient.
Most Pilot-y Line: A nurse accidentally splashes urine on Parker when they pass each other. Why is a nurse holding an open bottle of urine to begin with?
Our Call: STREAM IT. While the ER in Berlin ER looks grungier and bleaker than ones we’ve seen on American TV, the beats of the show will be familiar to people who are fans of medical dramas. In this case, the show is watchable because of its cast, especially Jones and Popadic.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Berlin ER’ On Apple TV+, About An Overcrowded ER In The “Worst” Hospital In Berlin appeared first on Decider.
