“Sick Berlin”: Tough series about our broken healthcare system

The trauma surgeon Dr. med. Ben Weber in the hoodie from a Berlin club, gets lost onto the street, is almost run over. He later wakes up many film cracks on the roof of the fictional clinic from his drug trip. He still takes up his work in the emergency room.

As a spectator, you are also dazed at what is because we experience his trip up close-as a breathtaking music video with interlocking lighting effects, dance scenes, flashing faces, ambulance, lying on the emergency room-everything with the booming rap song from Princess Nokia is assembled.

Has a hero ever been introduced in a white smock in a series of hospital?

I can’t remember and I know most. Starting with the “Black Forest clinic”most prominent representative of the escapist phase of the German hospital series in the 1980s, in which sun-tanned doctors always have time for their patients, laugh and cry with them. Boring and foreign to the world, the staunch phase of the hospital series.

Was more entertaining “Doctor’s Diary” In the 2000s, the German variant of “Grey’s Anatomy”; The young doctors had fun, there were cool sayings, a little rebellion and a lot of sex.

Then nothing innovative came from Germany at first – and I was bingeing “Dr. House” (Series start 2004). Hugh Laurie played the gifted diagnostician with the title -giving name. Together with Freddy Highmore as an autistic “Good Doctor” (Series start 2017) he belongs in the ingenious phase of the genre “Medical”.

With “Sick Berlin” Now we step into it – how can you call that? – Naturalistic phase of the hospital series. There is a little bit of “Emergency room” from the 1990s with George Clooney as a paternal main character.

But “Sick Berlin” If you are blatant, you get more nerves, shake you up. Perhaps because the doctors are not awesome and rarely compassionate – and the nursing staff chronically annoyed and rebellious.

There is constant chaos, some scenes are reminiscent of the once legendary “Knife clerk ambulance” in Johannisburg. Seriously injured people scream, a lot of blood flows, with the two directors Fabian Möhrke and Axel Schaad succeed in leaving no disgust – the series is (usually) good for sensitive spectators.

The narcotics -dependent trauma surgeon Weber is beautifully embodied by Slavko Popadić, one or the other by rapid roles, for example in the “Crime scene” already known. On the one hand, he lies without any conscience and delivers other team members to the knife to pull his head out of the noose, on the other hand, he carefully takes care of homeless and illegal migrants.

Haley Louise Jones Dr. med. Zanna Parker, who comes from healing Munich to the focus clinic. In Munich, she had successfully led a geriatric department into the black figures and is now looking for a new challenge – as head of the hospital rescue center with the worst reputation throughout Germany.

The managing director of the house lets Parker know what he is expecting from her right from the start “makes life easier”By letting the rescue center silently and on the back burner, because money is not ill in the chronically ill.

And Dr. Parker after recovering from the first shock over chaos. With her measures, she makes herself unpopular: Narcotics have to be removed from now onTo be registered and when a carer puts a tablet box in her pocket, she fires it – no matter how bad the nursing emergency is. She demands that all recording diagnoses are recorded electronically – otherwise the case flat rates cannot be billed.

The word that I had to explain in my articles in subordinate clauses for many years “Sick Berlin” Just fall that makes it clear how much the grievances of commercialized medicine have now become aware of all of us. Although, small downside, the medical team of consultants of the series did not research well: Lawless flat rates can only be settled after inpatient stays of patients in hospitals, not for outpatient treatments in the emergency room.

In this way we come to the important question that every viewer asks: How realistic is the terrifying scenario of “Sick Berlin”? From my own time as a doctor in the emergency room, I would confirm: quite realistic about the interactions and the emotional situation of the constantly stressed staff. No wonder, after all, a former doctor, Samuel Jefferson, wrote down on the script and probably processed his own traumatic experiences.

Medicine abuse is more common among doctors than in many other professional groups – 20 to 30 percent are affected. After a template for Weber, which shamelessly uses the narcotics cabinet, you don’t have to search for long in Berlin-three and a half years ago, a Charité doctor was in court who had stolen ampoules again and again and injected herself on the women’s toilet.

In general, the Charité, which last year also focuses on investigative research of the star Stand that the filmmakers at least have inspired. The building of the sick is architecturally modeled on the main building of the internationally renowned, but also always scandaled Berlin top hospital.

From a medical point of view, everything is so far in the green area, with no great value on the traceability of diagnoses or surgical indications. The professional is not in the foreground, and patients mostly only appear as a carrier of symptoms of illness and injuries that scream too often and annoy the personnel with constant demands and symptoms. Their stories of suffering remain hidden from the audience – just as the doctors and nurses in the hard hospital reality in Germany, too is here “Sick Berlin” ruthlessly real.

Other reviewers already compared the series “Emergency room”but it went deeper into diagnostic and therapeutic details – in “Sick Berlin” dominate the interpersonal and the devastating poor working conditions.

The cast is diverse, many of the actors have a migration background, as in real German hospitals. Most faces are new and unused, the acting achievements are so good that you often have the feeling of a reality documentary.

My conclusion? When I was for the first time “Sick Berlin” heard, was my spontaneous reaction: for God’s sake, why should you look at something like that, isn’t the world sad enough? But the stories are soaked with black humor, there are many strange scenes, you often have to laugh, the innovative visual language, the Talking Camera and the perfect music use round off the horror experience.

For me a must-see.

And for the presenting German film market we can only hope that “Berlin he” – According to the international title of the revolutionary innovative hospital series Made in Germany – who started worldwide – is also a revolutionary success. So that a season two will soon follow. Part three of season one and the previous episodes can be seen on Apple TV+ from today. And if you can wait a little longer, you can eventually stream the whole series on ZDFNEO that was involved in the production.