"If you can't work hungover, then don't be a trauma surgeon.” There’s never a dull moment in the “KRANK” – short for Krankenhaus (lit. “sick house”) and referring here to the emergency ward – the new home of Dr. Suzanna Parker, a young physician who left her Munich job in geriatrics for personal reasons that are revealed slowly. When she steps into her new Berlin workplace for the first time, it looks to be straight out of a hospital in a cinematic war zone: dimly lit and overcrowded wards filled with patients crying out, staff frantically running about. This sets the stage for Berlin ER (its original title is KRANK Berlin) created by former-ER-physician-turned-screenwriter Samuel Jefferson and Viktor Jakovleski, a new eight-episode series which just made its premiere on Apple TV+ with its first two episodes (upon which this review is based), the rest rolling out once every week through 9 April.

Dr. Parker (South African-born British actress Haley Louise Jones, most recently having starred in Fabian Stumm’s German tragicomedy Sad Jokes [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Fabian Stumm
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scheda film]). Rounding out the main cast is receptionist May-Lee Krause (Mai Phuong Kollath), internal medicine doctor Dominik (Aram Tafreshian), and older EMT Olaf (Bernhard Schütz) and trainee Olivia (Samirah Breuer), who together drive an ambulance in Berlin’s always eventful Neukölln district.

In a series where Berlin itself is its own character, you still might need to suspend your disbelief at the hospital’s unrealistically decaying building, even for the city’s standards (and at one point, a drug addict brought in for treatment runs around unsupervised for nearly the entire episode). With a strong emphasis on its grimy corners, the colour grading and production design give the hospital the look of a dirty club rather than that a sterile environment. With hip-hop music slathered into its transitions and intercuts of urban shots of Berlin’s classic graffitied walls, Berlin ER goes for a grimy feel that sometimes borders on artifice for those familiar with the city. Between more mundane injuries emerge patients with odder Berlin-esque mishaps, like injuries from playing too hard on sex swings – and the more-than-occasional gunshot wound patient, a nod to the city's clan territoriality that one might only read about in news articles.

However, this is also part of the series’ appeal, where its specificity becomes its ultimate selling point and what makes it stand out from other medical dramas. The series makes jokes about Germany’s lack of digitalisation and brings in the lives of characters from Berlin’s large Turkish-German community, including that of Emina. The hospital’s doctors must be as steely and hostile as their environment in order to survive, as healthcare is also immediately politicised: for instance, Emina dictates the order of treating shooting victims based on who on the outside she knows might retaliate (appropriately, the show’s tagline is “Underpaid. Understaffed. Overworked”).

A roving lens and high-flying camerawork add to the franticness of the series’ premise, an element that further adds to the show's originality. The camera moves with urgency in long movements not unlike a rollercoaster, climbing up and diving back down again and swerving around to zoom in on our heroes. Once you move past the slight silliness on which the show is premised, Berlin ER proves itself to be a unique series that builds upon the medical drama formula in an impressive fashion.

Berlin ER was produced by Violet Pictures and REAL FILM Berlin for Apple TV+ and ZDFneo. Beta Film is managing the series’ world sales.