“Critical: Between Life and Death,” on Netflix, is a six-part documentary about the London Major Trauma System. The show was filmed over 21 days and includes dispatchers, E.M.T.s, surgeons, nurses, managers, therapists and patients with a variety of crises. The footage of all the medical treatments is graphic and unflinching; blood, guts and most especially mangled limbs abound.
All the action of the show is riveting, and all the health care providers are calm and competent. Doctors here share their own histories of catastrophic loss and trauma, and some of the most profound healing they offer their patients is not in the operating room but at the bedside. “We’re going to make Jack a new forehead and eye socket!” one surgeon chirps, assembling bone fragments and mesh to reconstruct a man’s face. During a consultation, Jack begins to panic, and a real horror sweeps over him. The doctor takes his hand, and the two grip each other with a mutual, desperate intensity.
Where “Critical” loses some ground is in how goosed its story lines are and how much it adopts the styles of generic streaming true-crime documentaries. We hear from patients’ loved ones before we hear from the patients themselves, which drags out the “Wait, did they live or die?” in ways that feel cheap and scuzzy. Talking-head segments are blue-toned and somber and appear to be filmed in abandoned warehouses. The show uses the same footage repeatedly, and its super-up-close B-roll is generic.
These choices dim but do not extinguish the show’s power. “Critical” beautifully captures the fragility and vulnerability of life — and the paradoxical resilience that can come from accepting its cruel randomness.
And while that is a universal experience, an American viewer cannot help but notice that no one here is being treated for a gunshot wound, and no one is terrified of choking to death on medical debt. Patients repeatedly express their gratitude to the N.H.S. and say how cared for they feel, how supported, how relieved.
Margaret Lyons is a television critic at The Times, and writes the TV parts of the Watching newsletter.
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