“Krank Berlin” on Apple TV shows how dramatic things are in an emergency room.

German medical series are not for everyone. "Krank Berlin", an eight-part series that is marketed on the international market under the more tongue-friendly title "Berlin ER", keeps as much distance as possible. The visuals are dark, the hand-held camera plays around with the depth of field, the beats thump in the soundtrack. And all the faces are overtired and overwhelmed. Everyone needs more colleagues and money. Everyone moans about equipment failures, and when new customers roll through the door, you never know whether they are accompanied by extended families and the police will have to seal off the entrance. The emergency room of "Krank", as the clinic is casually called, is the epitome of the German health care misery and a reflection of exhausted society.

The first patient the series introduces us to isn't one: a partygoer drags himself through the streets of Berlin after midnight. He's completely drunk, crashes into a taxi, is taken to the clinic in the same taxi, and there a gentle friend (Benjamin Radjaipour) gives him infusions to sober him up until his shift starts. Meet Doctor Ben Weber (Slavko Popadic). He's one of the doctors at the "Krank", needs Berlin nights to balance things out and has a massive problem with taking pills; it's almost understandable given the working conditions. A broken hero and not a demigod in white.

The head of the emergency room, Suzanna Parker (Haley Louise Jones), has no idea of ​​Weber's disastrous condition or that of her department. Parker is new in Berlin, the fourth boss in a very short time and perhaps a little too young not to be the fifth to leave. But Steffen Beck (Peter Lohmeyer), the hospital director with a weak backbone, only mentions the age thing in passing. He suspects that he has hired the right person this time and assumes that the team will warm to the newcomer. The institutional knowledge of her colleagues will reach Parker and, conversely, she will also contribute ideas. Once the shock has worn off.

The cast is a perfect fit - across the board. Safak Sengül plays the resolute doctor Emina Ertan, who had to cut ties with her Turkish family for the job and can use a fire extinguisher to take out annoying people. Aram Tafreshian is Dominik Kohn, who covers up his lack of competence with an overly friendly demeanor. Bernhard Schütz ("Prejudices?", "Professional Experience!") shines as the paramedic Olaf. The down-to-earth old man has to introduce an idealistic youngster (Samirah Breuer) to real life and is therefore a potential audience favorite - even if that is not the right word for this series. "Krank Berlin" is stylistically too ambitious for that.

Significantly, it is not a medical series that springs to mind as a point of comparison when describing this style, but rather the workplace drama "The Bear". In the first few episodes, the camera and editing drive the pace at an incredible rate that the viewer cannot process at all, and just as "The Bear" captures us in the hectic pace of a precarious sandwich kitchen, "Krank Berlin" (camera: Tim Kuhn and Jieun Yi) captures us in the hectic pace of an emergency room with doctors and nurses. It is a total sensory overload, right down to the soundtrack, which is drawn into a frenzy as the brain fog sets in.

Two cries of pain later, the hustle and bustle returns. The ambulance brings new patients, and on some days they arrive in such large numbers that those waiting on the stretcher in the hallway long for a bottle of Coke to relieve their bladders, and even outside in the dark, sick people who have no insurance hope for a helping hand.

There is hardly any time to take a breath. The emotional rollercoaster ride that made hospital stories popular, perfected by the US series “ER” (1994 to 2009), reaches an intensity in “Krank Berlin” that is surprising by German standards.

The series was produced by Apple and ZDFneo - after it was originally developed for Sky and ran into turmoil when German in-house productions stopped. The script was written by a team led by Viktor Jakovleski and Samuel Jefferson. Jakovleski had the idea, Jefferson worked for several years as an emergency doctor in Great Britain before switching careers and learning to write scripts.

Is that why "Sick Berlin" is so strong? Certainly. Without these directors (Alex Schaad and Fabian Möhrke) and designers, the same script could have suffered fatigue fractures. Thanks to them, we sit tied up between overwhelmed life savers and feel that the system cannot be saved from collapse for much longer. The only place worse, the series whispers, is in German nursing homes.