In Critical: Between Life And Death, cameras spend 21 days following different teams involved in trauma response around London. This includes ER staff at major trauma centers around the city, to the ambulance dispatch team, to air ambulance crews and more. In each episode, a few cases are followed, whether they’re from the same incident or different ones, and the loved ones of the patients being treated are interviewed.
Opening Shot: A phone-shot scene from the seat of a carnival swing ride. The sister of one of the victims of an accident that happened on a different ride marvels that this was only a few minutes before the accident.
The Gist: In the first episode, an accident on a carnival ride sends four people to the emergency room. Two of them, Alison and Nick, were a couple on the ride that collapsed. The Tactical Operations Center determines who needs the most urgent attention, dispatching ambulances on both the ground and in the air to the scene. Alison is taken to nearby King’s College hospital; when she comes to, she’s incoherent, perhaps due to a head injury, and broken ribs are puncturing a lung. Nick is taken to St. George’s Hospital; one side of his face is mostly broken and he has a number of other major traumas.
Also hurt are Silvana, an 11-year-old hit by a speaker when one of the cars on the ride collapsed, and her grandfather Sebastiano, who got hit in the head when he pushed his granddaughter out of the way of the falling speaker.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Critical: Between Life And Death is similar to another Netflix series, Emergency: NYC.
Our Take: One of the things we noticed in Critical: Between Life And Death is that the trauma system workers that the cameras follow never seem to yell. We don’t mean a panicked yell, but it seems that their manner is a whole lot more — Relaxed? Easygoing? Matter of Fact? — than their American counterparts.
We’re not sure if that’s due to their training, or just the fact that this is England, and Brits are just practicing their usual “stiff upper lip” stoicism. It could be both. But the smoothness of how the trauma teams at the hospitals responded to the incoming victims of the carnival accident was noticable.
By arranging each episode around one or two incidents, the producers aren’t going back and forth to show different cases. They’re covering too big of an area to do that, anyway. So the storytelling of each case is cohesive and has a beginning, middle and end. Did we love that there’s a bit of a manipulation in not immediately showing the patients being treated, leading us to wonder if they made it or not, or recovered to the point where they could be interviewed? No, we were not fans of that.
For the most part, though each episode makes a good attempt at showing exactly what the various first responders and trauma teams need to do and exactly how critical the injuries of the patients they’re treating really are.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Scenes from Episode 2, where a man who was attacked by a pipe-wielding assailant is airlifted to the hospital.
Sleeper Star: The concept of a trauma consultant is an interesting one; if there’s any kind of equivalent here in the U.S., it’s likely the charge nurse during a shift. Lala is the trauma consultant at King’s College when Alison, Silvana and Sebastiano come in, and she does a good job of describing what she does.
Most Pilot-y Line: One of the patients gets discharged and is still wearing a hospital gown. We’d imagine it’s because that person’s shirt was cut off to their chest could be examined, but it still was an odd sight.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Critical: Between Life And Death doesn’t try to be chaotic; its format gives the cases that come through the various trauma centers real story arcs for viewers to follow, which helps us connect with both the patients and the people working in London’s trauma system.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.