There’s More of "The Pitt" If You Just Head to Berlin

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Workplace dramas usually have a clear choice to make: Build your show around getting as close to day-to-day life as possible or show what it takes for all best laid plans to crumble. The recent word-of-mouth success of Max’s “The Pitt” stems in part from the idea that a hospital show can effectively do both. If your workplace is chaos incarnate by design, is there ever really a normal day? 

For those looking to keep that hospital show momentum going (without contributing to a viewership number that might soon get cited in a legal filing on behalf of an author’s estate), consider “Berlin ER,” Germany’s answer to 2025’s biggest word-of-mouth hit. The main home for this show is Kreuzberg-Neukölln (KRANK for short), a Berlin-area hospital with an emergency room that seems to cycle through management as often as it does its own patients. The latest person to try to tame this unwieldy beast is Dr. Zanna Parker (Haley Louise Jones), who’s looking to restart her own life while fixing the gaps in the KRANK’s org chart. (In some countries, including Germany, the show’s title is “Krank: Berlin.” I respect the retitling, but it is fun to imagine Jason Statham running around defibrillating himself at the Brandenburg Gate.)

The hospital’s other main “Berlin ER” entry point is Dr. Ben Weber (Slavko Popadić), fulfilling the TV medical drama mandate of having at least one key employee who’s both vital to the hospital’s success and battling their own personal substance abuse issues. He’s introduced barreling right through a long night at a Berlin club into a day shift where he’s handling both key diagnoses and instruments with very sharp blades. Perhaps you can see how this may become an issue in future episodes. Ben — who, as far as I can tell isn’t based on this Ben Weber — is also one of the key patient liaisons at the hospital, having earned the respect and trust of the unhoused folks both inside and around the hospital grounds. 

Much like its East Pennsylvania counterpart, “Berlin ER” fills out its roster with characters who become instantly distinguishable by key traits but don’t become solely defined by them. There’s Dr. Emina Ertan (Safak Sengül), one of the staff’s most capable employees who also happens to be actively looking for a job elsewhere. Paramedics Olivia (Samirah Breuer) and Olaf (Bernhard Schütz) give the show the opportunity to go out into the city and provide a closer look at a cross-section of Berliners in need. Arriving with both eagerness and confidence, Dr. Dom Kohn (Aram Tafreshian) gradually becomes the season’s biggest moral test case.

Hospital shows aren’t so different from detective shows. Each room is a little medical crime scene where any number of doctors can go hunting for clues. The thrill-seekers and the problem solvers and the empaths all find their respective niche in an emergency room, bringing their own expertise. Focusing solely on that problem-solving aspect, though, is the quickest way to ensure your medical show hits a repetitive rut. A drama that roots itself solely in patient-related mysteries makes itself entirely dependent on the quality of those mysteries. And if the engine for a TV drama is the novel and the bizarre, how long can a show keep those oddities flowing before one of the realest environments for a fictional story becomes a forced fantasy?

One of the strengths of “The Pitt” is keeping the immediate nature of a procedural, only with patients flying in at a rate that keeps any particular one from towering over the rest. Some may be more memorable (if you can still see the word “degloving” without flinching, you are made of stronger stuff than I am). But like the hospital around it, if you’re focusing too much on one patient, some of your resources are likely going to waste. 

“Berlin ER” may not have the same firehose of incoming patients. It also isn’t tied to who is flowing in or out. Ben’s slippery hold on his sobriety, Zarra’s slow transformation of the KRANK into a more orderly operation, and Emina’s gaze toward greener pastures all form key parts of the show’s foundation. Those all play out on a much longer timeline, but that doesn’t mean that “Berlin ER” doesn’t also zero in on the slow-moving incremental changes that fill out so much of the 15 “Pitt” episodes. What “Berlin ER” loses in that piling up of small-scale problems over a single day, it gains in watching them pile up over weeks and months. Physician, heal thy workstation.

These two shows are also a fascinating case study in how hospital shows use sound. Most of “The Pitt” has a low hum, the persistent beeping that takes a literal pulse and gives it to the entire building. “Berlin ER” is closer to controlled cacophony. In the thumping bass of a nightclub or the distorted conversations during Ben’s more self-medicated moments, “Berlin ER” is designed to be a more explicitly sensory experience. (One impressive mid-season touch: the sound of reviving a flatlining patient segues perfectly into John Gürtler and Jan Miserre’s score, which continues as the show crosscuts to somewhere else in the hospital.) The silence of “Berlin ER” becomes even more stark because of that sharper contrast. An early episode sees the staff lose a patient in the middle of an operation. The jump cut from the sound of clattering equipment and urgent crosstalk to the quiet solitude of one character contemplating what went wrong is the power you get from a show living at both ends of that spectrum at once. 

The KRANK and The Pitt have a similar layout but take fundamentally different aesthetic approaches. If “The Pitt” is the classic example of a sterile, neutral hospital interior, with nothing remarkable except some pediatric room murals, “Berlin ER” plays out in a space designed for emotional highs and lows. It’s a place of accent walls and cool color palettes, like the building itself is designed for a Five Stages of Grief photoshoot. There are no harsh fluorescents here. Zanna and Ben and Dom are all doing their respective personal and professional penances in a facility more explicitly designed to be an emotional purgatory. 

Those key sensory choices make it even more interesting to see how the tightest connections between the two shows still play out differently in context. Family members become patients. People in line at triage complain about long wait times. Doctors have to step in to make sure that police don’t harass a fellow staff member. Watch both of these seasons and you’ll be on your way to knowing how to properly intubate someone. 

Rather than feel like a rehash of key plot points in “The Pitt,” these become part of a larger international comparison point. “Berlin ER” shows all the ways that providing proper medical care is a distinct challenge, regardless of what overarching national healthcare system is in place. In the process, we can pick up what each show values most. You see the ebbs and flows of jargon and emotion, of the banal and the life-changing. Every hospital show features people at their breaking point. Part of what keeps us coming back to these shows is seeing what happens when those moments arrive. 

Is this emotional release for TV drama’s sake or a genuine show of catharsis? You vote for one side or the other with your viewing time. Maybe the slow buildup over an entire season, cresting at a giant endpoint is what you’d prefer. Anyone looking for people shouldering that day-to-day barrage of the consequences of their own actions and the State of the World might find something fulfilling within the halls of the KRANK.