"KRANK Berlin" on Apple TV+: Emergency doctors between chaos and crash

Apple TV+ is bringing "KRANK Berlin" back to the screen. However, the medical series is clearly different from other products in the genre, because the title says it all. From the grim everyday life of a Berlin emergency room, where you look in vain for demigods in white.

Hospitals are not the first places that spring to mind when it comes to escaping the currently rather gloomy everyday life for a while. Unless the hospital is called Seattle Grace, where attractive doctors treat the sick with as much passion as they do their private love lives. And in "Emergency Room" an emergency room caused a hype around Dr. Ross and his colleagues back in the 1990s. The emergency room in the new Apple TV+ series "KRANK Berlin", on the other hand, is certainly a place that no Berliner would ever want to end up in. So it's lucky that it's pure fiction. Or is it?

Dr. Zanna Parker (Haley Louise Jones) has moved to the "KRANK" to take over the management of the emergency room and thus escape the private mess she left behind in Munich. However, what awaits her in the run-down Neukölln clinic is not exactly healing for her ailing state of mind. Absolute chaos reigns here. The staff is chronically overworked, the equipment is outdated. The clinic has been ruined by cost-cutting over the last few years. And so the "KRANK" is known beyond the city's borders as the "shittiest hospital in the whole country". Those in charge are certainly busting their proverbial butts. Dr. Ben Weber (Slavko Popadić) is a competent but drug-dependent trauma surgeon who treats patients without health insurance on the run-down clinic grounds and in the darkest corners of the filthy place.

gunshots, drugs, sex accidents

The exceptionally talented and sought-after surgeon Emina Ertan (Şafak Şengül) is not very good with people, while assistant Dominik Kohn (Aram Tafreshian) seems to have a knack for them, but less so for medicine itself and working under great pressure, which is why he makes several serious mistakes. At the forefront of the operation are the idealistic Olivia (Samirah Breuer) and the cynical Olaf (Bernhard Schütz) as an ambulance team, who often have personal clashes. There is already enough to do in the Moloch Berlin, which basically takes on another leading role. From gunshot wounds to sex accidents, from hypochondriacs to overdoses, from car accidents to fire disasters, everything is there.

Many people who have had the dubious pleasure of ending up in one can certainly confirm that things can sometimes get wild in Berlin's emergency rooms. In "KRANK", however, things seem to be a bit worse; the series thrives on exaggeration, and yet the writing team Samuel Jefferson and Viktor Jakovleski have worked close to reality. After all, Jefferson himself once worked as an emergency doctor in London and knows about the problem of ailing health systems and the stress of being a doctor in this position in a big city. Because the fact that profit is often the main focus and people only play a subordinate role is nothing new. And so the patients in "KRANK" are more of a passing item. They come, they go, and sometimes they die. Either way, those who gave everything to save them are themselves at the end of their strength afterwards.

Not for the faint-hearted

It goes without saying that none of this is for the faint-hearted. The scenes are often very explicit, and anyone who can't stand the sight of blood (on film) will quickly reach their limits. Directed by Alex Schaad and Fabian Möhrke in cooperation with ZDFneo, a series was created that stands out positively from the watered-down, uniform mass of other German series and is sure to be a top contender internationally. The editing, camera work and sound support the hectic pace of the emergency room as well as the chaotic emotional states of the protagonists, so that you can get dizzy just watching.

The disused sports and recreation center (SEZ) at Volkspark Friedrichshain is the perfect setting for "KRANK". Decades of vacancy have taken their toll visually. After much back and forth, the building is now set to be demolished soon. But maybe there is still enough time for Real Film Berlin to put on a second season of "KRANK Berlin" there?! The authors have at least already provided the cliffhanger for this.

The first two episodes of "KRANK Berlin" will be available on Apple TV+ from February 26th. After that, another of the eight episodes will follow every Wednesday until April 9th.