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4hr ago
Berlin ER or Krank Berlin as it should've been called since that's its name is a pretty good show that has the same sort of hectic pace and stays in the vein of only slight bits of story/personal lives away from the hospital.
It's doesn't have the constant woke injections like The Pitt but I'd say it still does the special bit of showing that cops are just as bad or worse than gang members thing by the end.
I was shocked at the show seemingly displaying the immigration demographics as they are (I assume, I'm not German). Much of the cast is brown/black and immigrant and most of the people coming into the hospital are as well. And for the first few episodes it felt like there wasn't going to be much of political angle at all but after much of the emergency room visits being immigrant gang members knifing each other I suppose maybe they had to have their cops beating innocent people because they're the wrong color part to not be accused of being racist. Either way it's pretty good but gets kinda washed out in the middle, treading water and extending plots over episodes when they could have wrapped up more quickly. But I think it finishes well, it's not many episodes anyway.
The medical accuracy felt much weaker but I don't know about German medical standards and the hospital in the show is supposed to be a piece of shit that barely runs so it's less about watching a well-oiled machine work like The Pitt and more about seeing how a hospital that has no real facilities, equipment, or staff to handle pretty much any medical situation muddles through. It does have much less insufferable characters and situations than The Pitt. But it also feels amateurish by comparison when showing the medical cases and treatments which is a shame.
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5hr ago
There was a TV Show a few years back called New Amsterdam and it was the peakness of Woke. It wasn't really well received or popular but it certainly was probably a signal of the high water mark of the popularity of that ideology I think. But it could also have been a very well disguised parody. I couldn't take it after a couple seasons so there could quite possibly be better examples than these, I wish I could find clips of them but it's hard to beat tumors caused by racism.
There was a whole episode about getting people to take the COVID vaccine because their freezer broke or something and they need to use up all the vaccines in a small period of time. So they get the word out and people show up but when the Chief notices that everyone waiting in line to get it is white he cancels the plan to give it out so he can give it to black people but when he approaches the black community over it they say they've all gotten their vaccine and he needs to look in his own backyard, to which the token conservative character says they haven't gotten the vaccine because they're waiting until people at risk get it, so the Chief decides to tell him to gather all his conservative friends and they all show up just in time for the arbitrary timer on the vaccine's viability to run out and nobody get vaccinated at all.
Another episode is about a previous Chief from the 70s-80s getting cancelled for throwing away donated blood during the AIDS crisis. That's it. Apart from doing that he was perfectly coded as a good left-leaning guy he did great stuff for minorities and the underprivileged but he breaks down and admits that they couldn't be sure if the blood donated from gay people at the time could have infected people with HIV so he ordered the blood thrown out. His legacy destroyed and the new Chief, disgusted at his decision, has to confirm to others that yes, it was true this man made a mistake with blood 50 years ago and must be erased from history. In the end, the old man leaves in shame as his picture is removed from the hospital wall.
I remember an episode where a minor was getting a court injunction against the hospital because they said their treatment was bad and the court responded by shutting down on childrens' aspects of the hospital until it was investigated and the first thing the psychiatrist says to the Chief about it is "You need to sort this out now, they're already shutting down our trans children's clinic."
To me, The Pitt in many ways seems more preachy even though the episodes are dedicated to mostly medical treatment because it's often injected into situations apropos of nothing and the resolutions feel bad because they're presented in the narrative in a way that feels like they're strawmanning/weakmanning an argument and then declaring victory.
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6hr ago
The Wire exists. As best as I can recall there is only a single real murder investigation in the wire that's not gang related. In fact there's an entire storyline about no one giving a shit about gang murders because they're not interesting or meritorious enough to devote resources to investigate.
Okay, but the Wire has more investigative elements than most shows procedural or not. Procedural pretty much really only means self-contained because most investigative shows are filled with gobs of pointless drama and soap-opera b plots that are strung through many episodes or like any British investigative show about 40 minutes of the victim's family arguing about vague things to present them as red herrings. Law & Order is probably the only thing that represents a show that's just investigations contained in an episode, maybe the early CSI seasons as well.
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