Inside Berlin ER, the gritty new Apple TV+ drama that makes the hospital feel like a war zone

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.