27-02-2025
'Berlin ER' on Apple TV+: Every other medical drama is tame in comparison to this brilliantly intense show
Medical dramas set in North America have this sort of glossy look to their hospital settings, a colour palette of white and blues, oftentimes looking quite sterile. While The Pitt has recently been praised for its stress-inducing and authentic storytelling, the new Apple TV+ show Berlin ER (Krank: Berlin) takes things several notches.
Unlike any other medical drama you've seen, Berlin ER is much grittier, more chaotic, emotional, all with a sardonic edge. And that goes far beyond the medical cases and into the personal lives of the nurses, doctors and paramedics we meet on the show. The German-language series is addictive and takes no short cuts in its path to creating a gripping, sometimes stomach-churning, series.
After her personal life imploded in Munich, Dr. Suzanna Parker, played by Haley Louise Jones, makes the move to Berlin, thrown into the absolute mayhem of the hospital's emergency room. Tasked implementing work place reforms, that seems like an impossible task. The unit is run with limited equipment, and what they have is quite antiquated, it's understaffed and run in a state of chaos.
It doesn't help that the doctors and nurses are completely resistant to Dr. Parker's effort, mostly because they just don't have the time to worry about anything other than the patients in front of them.
Among Dr. Parker's new colleagues is Dr. Ben Weber, who's an incredibly competent doctor but is frequently trying to sober up from his drinking and drug use to get back to helping patients. But his motto for working is very much, do what needs to be done, forget about the formal process, much to Dr. Parker's dismay.
"He does it his own way, and he has this passion," Popadic told Yahoo Canada. "When I talk to our creators, Samuel [Jefferson], who was a surgeon in London, and Viktor [Jakovleski] has a friend who worked in a Berlin hospital, he got mentally ill, and they both were like, 'Ben is based on these two guys.' This put the thing on a whole other level for me."
A core advantage of Berlin ER is that co-creator and executive producer, Samuel Jefferson, is an emergency room physician-turned-screenwriter. When he was in film school London he was still working as an emergency room doctor, and when the recommendation came to create a medical drama, he wasn't enthusiastic about the idea.
"[I] flatly refused. I think because I was just way too close to it and I was still in it, and it was still doing what it was doing to me," Jefferson said. "And I think then gradually, as time passed, ... I realized as the show went on like, oh I'm really releasing something that I had in me. And I think writing is therapy."
"There was obviously a lot of therapy that I needed and I think that just sort of poured out of me once that started coming, and we started getting into the show. I never really censored myself ... or stopped anything coming out."
With an emergency room being built to film the show, Jefferson recalled the first day on set when he realized he could actually use all the props, including the medical machines brought in for the show, which was an odd feeling for him.
"It was a really weird feeling of stepping back into a past life almost, and it was a little bit traumatic," Jefferson shared. "So I think it's been good for me to get it out."
"And I think for a lot of doctors and nurses that work in the profession, you have to be seen as heroic. Sometimes ... it's very hard to admit, 'I can be unwell as well,' or 'I can have problems.' It's sort of almost a love letter to them as well, to be like, it's OK. We see you. You're allowed to be messy and a bit human."
But within this robust material, Jones has a particularly unique task of playing Dr. Parker, because she's a character who gets completely thrown into the complexity of her new work environment, starting from a place where she's just entirely overwhelmed. The actor said it was a "joy" to start from that place as her character.
"It gives you so many layers to work with and I love the fact that I could sort of discover Berlin ER through her eyes," Jones said. "Also I love her struggles and I empathize with her so much. ... Just being a female in this world comes with its own set of challenges and I loved to explore that."
"It added to the struggles that we have as human beings, and also topics like being bullied, being bullied in the workplace, or being forced, basically, to sort of stand your ground, and almost prove, even though you don't want to prove, that you're able to do your job, and that you have a right to be there. I really, really love being able to explore those topics."
And a real draw of Berlin ER is how it balances the jobs of these medical professionals, with their personal lives, and the concerns of the patients. It's a tricky balance to struck but the show does so in a was that feel completely filled and stressful, but not overstuffed.
"It adds a secret to the character and I loved everything, every struggle that added to her," Jones said. "And I think we all know that, from life, you can be at work just trying to do your job, but there's this thing that's nagging, or pulling on your heart, or your stomach."
"There's this extra thing that's sort of like an undercurrent constantly, and your mind keeps going there. And I really loved exploring that and the tension that it created."
While it's teased at the beginning of the season that Dr. Parker is dealing with something complicated related to her family in Munich, for Dr. Weber, his substance abuse becomes an interesting factor in his story.
"It was quite intense," Popadic said. "Because I talked to people who had similar problems, and it really took time to really get it inside of me."
"I also talked to doctors ... who worked with addicts, and I think to get to this state of mind or to get it into your body, it took me the most time for my preparation."
As Jefferson explained, in order to get that unique intensity and raw storytelling for the show, there were a few core elements that were established from the beginning.
"It was always on the table that it had to be authentic, and not necessarily realistic, like one-to-one to the actual job, but the authenticity of really what it's like," Jefferson said. "And I think life can be as messy and terrible as it is beautiful and funny."
"I think with the show, there's some irony to the fact that a lot of medical shows look clinical. And actually, my experience of working as a doctor is medicine is way more like farming than it is working in a lab. It's messy and it's smelly and it's gritty, but it's also fun and a bit freewheeling, and it's a lot more chaotic, I think, than we might want to think it is."
Jefferson added that it was always known that Berlin ER was not going to be a show like House where much of the drama came from the medical cases.
"We wanted it to be much more behind-the-scenes, doctors and nurses lives and the pressure of the job," he said.
He explained that "tiers" were established for the medical cases on the show. The first tier was composed of cases that added a "spice" or "flavour" to an episode, any case that could be visual or feel "a bit Berlin". Then there are the medical cases where the patients were named and would be around for a whole episode. The third tier was for patients who impact a main character's journey, included in multiple episodes.
"A roller-coaster is how I tried to always think about it, like where are we on the journey for the person who's giving us their time at home to watch it," Jefferson said. "And a lot of the content I see that passes for TV now doesn't do that. It's just sort of a flat ride."
"But I think with us, we really wanted to be, 'Give us your attention and your time, and we'll take you on something, and keep you in the centre.'"
