Samuel Jefferson, a former ER doctor in London who co-created the new Apple TV+ medical drama Berlin ER, told me that he heard from his mother not long after the first episodes began airing. Watching the show’s frazzled trauma surgeons, the never-ending stream of patients, the head-spinning chaos, the blood, the absence of sentimentality, and the way the doctors, nurses, and paramedics struggle to maintain composure in spite of the bedlam all around, Jefferson’s shocked mother wondered whether she’d just gotten an accurate peek into her son’s old life: “Was it really like that?”
To be clear: In this umpteenth TV medical drama, there’s a refreshing absence of white coat-wearing superheroes who make it all look easy — and there are certainly no McDreamys to be found. Berlin ER, which is a little more than halfway finished with its eight-episode first season, is more concerned with the high-stakes pressure cooker of an emergency ward and the toll it takes on hospital staffers who run the gamut from a young, idealistic paramedic to a surgeon who’s practically a junkie. Attempting to bring some semblance of order to the chaos is Dr. “Zanna” Parker, a former head of geriatrics at a hospital in Munich who’s now the Berlin ER’s fifth supervisor in a year.
The job is such a meat grinder, the surgeons, nurses, and paramedics barely register her first day on the job. On a board that lists the names and tasks of everyone on-duty, someone has replaced Dr. Parker’s name with the German expression for “f*ck off.”
The administrator who hired Dr. Parker tells her he’d just as soon eliminate the emergency department altogether. It’s a drain on the hospital’s finances, often handling between 250 and 300 patients at its busiest. When Dr. Parker steps off the elevator and onto the floor for the first time, it’s sensory overload; patients, some of them bloodied, line the hallways in a haphazard mess. A viewer can practically smell the mixture of sweat and ammonia and likewise feel the breeze from frantic nurses scrambling through the corridors.
This, we come to learn, is “the worst hospital in Berlin.” At various points, we see hospital staff quietly relieve a shooting victim of the gun in his pants before the police spot it and make the situation worse; equipment power cords don’t always reach as far as they’re needed; the druggie doctor pleads with a colleague to handle a hip surgery he’s scheduled to perform; and a guy gets brought in who was stabbed in the butt during a fight, while the staff messes with him by telling him he needs a colostomy bag.
“The show has got a war zone quality,” Jefferson says. “Trainspotting was an early reference. It’s really funky, cool, electric, and then it gets really intensely dark. Our show is sort of similar. We have these fun, electric moments of high energy, but they’re intercut with — yeah, like, this is hard. I’m very proud we managed to get a flavor of that in there.”
Success in the fickle field of streaming entertainment is often a product of luck and timing as much as anything, and Berlin ER certainly has that latter ingredient working in its favor. Emergency medicine is enjoying a bit of resurgent TV popularity at the moment, with Max, Netflix, and Apple all launching new ER-based shows (Max’s The Pitt and Apple’s Berlin ER are out now, while Netflix’s Pulse is coming on April 3). No doubt to Apple’s satisfaction, meanwhile, Berlin ER currently has a perfect 100% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes and a near-perfect 96% audience score as of this writing.
The show depicts a burned-out staff that somehow makes an unworkable system work. Their many eccentricities and vices also give Berlin ER an applicability that extends beyond medicine: Essentially, this is a show about a found family comprised of broken people; saving the lives of patients also requires figuring out how to fix and save themselves.
“Doctors are very good at putting on a performance of everything being ok,” Jefferson continues. “It partly comes with the territory, with the job. You have to emotionally engage with the patient in front of you, but you have to keep something back. You’re the doctor. You’re the professional one. You can’t cry in front of your patient. You have to be secure. So you have to sort of bottle up these emotions. And I think you get used to doing that.
“Different shows do different things. Shows like Grey’s Anatomy are more soap-like — and that’s not a bad thing. Audiences want that. (In Berlin ER), we really led with the emotions of the characters and built the medicine around that.”
Those characters include staffers who are underpaid, chronically fatigued, and ill-equipped. There’s a doctor who hides his incompetence behind charm, while I found the ER paramedics — starry-eyed Olivia and the grizzled veteran Olaf — particularly endearing to watch. Olivia is also in love with another doctor in the ER (“Sometimes, I think it’s right to fight for love, you know?” she says).
Adds Jefferson: “We designed every character to have a coping mechanism that wasn’t a healthy one. Emina (an ER doctor), she deals with the onslaught of the job and the emotions that it brings up in you … by not dealing with the emotions. She really closes down and hyper-focuses on the medicine and the technicality of it. She has this hard persona, she’s pretty hard to break … There’s a reason why drug and alcohol use is so high in the medical fields. There’s a need to distract from the horrors of it.”
I ask Jefferson, given that most of us are scared of going to the doctor and we certainly would never want to go to the hospital willingly — why does he think medical dramas are so popular?
“I went to Peru at the end of last year, doing some hiking and sort of recovering after Season 1 was finished filming. And I was so surprised how much the ancient people from that area, like the Incas, were such a death-centric society. Like, they really focused on the idea that you will die at some point and (it) wasn’t the horrible thing we would see it as today. They really felt, ‘I’m going on to my next stage of existence.’
“That’s a roundabout way of saying I think we’re a very life-centric society, particularly in the West, and I think we don’t talk about death. It’s this topic that’s scary and we sort of ignore it as much as we can … I think hospital shows give you a little peek into that world, and into that part of your brain that you might be scared of looking at. There’s something about touching that darkness.”
