Anaesthesia, a new Polish medical drama on Netflix, is a story about a brilliant neurosurgeon who tries to rebuild his career in a local hospital after a risky surgery in Warsaw kills a young patient. But rather than go too deeply into the incident that causes the surgeon to find a new job, we get… a huge train accident?
ANAESTHESIA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A surgeon desperately tries to revive his patient after he flatlines.
The Gist: Dawid Łazarz (Leszek Lichota) is a renowned neurosurgeon at a huge hospital in Warsaw. But his daring surgeries have put him on thin ice with the facility’s administrators. When an “off-book” surgery kills a young patient, Dawid is fired after he shoves his boss into the wall right after leaving the operating room.
As he drives to a remote cabin to be alone with his thoughts, he comes across a massive train accident in the town of Suwałki. He jumps right in and tries to triage victims, even before the ambulances arrive. One of the passengers is Lezek Kott (Krzysztof Stelmaszyk), one of the doctors at Suwałki Specialist Hospital. He continues to triage and dress wounds as the EMTs arrive, including saving an EMT that gets caught in an explosion. He then goes to Suwałki Specialist and jumps right in to perform surgery on some of the more serious patients, including a soccer player whose leg he tries to save.
When the hospital’s administrator tells Dawid that they can use someone like him, Dawid decides that Suwałki Specialist is the perfect place to get his career back on track. But the chief of medicine, who was unable to be contacted during the train disaster, is suspicious of this surgeon that was hired without his knowledge.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Anaesthesia (Original Title: Znieczulenie) certainly has the feeling of American medical shows like ER and The Pitt. In fact, veteran showrunner Neal Baer, who was a producer on ER and a medical doctor, consulted on the show.
Our Take: The producers of Anaesthesia decided to go huge with the first episode, having Dawid be introduced to the staff at Suwałki Specialist via a massive train accident with dozens of dead and injured. We guess such an extreme event is a plausible way that Dawid makes his way to this smaller hospital and gets hired, but the way the event plays out is all sorts of wrong, complete with the idea that Dawid is just going to jump in and perform surgery on accident victims without anyone checking on who he is and why he’s there.
It certainly gives us an intense introduction to some of Dawid’s future colleagues, like Lezek and his wife Wanda (Dorota Kolak), an ER doc at the same hospital. And starting out with a whirlwind is exactly how ER grabbed people’s attention 32 years ago. But we just wish that the show’s producers figured out a better way to get Dawid into this situation than drop him in the middle of a massive disaster. As we get into his conflicts with the chief of medicine, his unorthodox approaches to the cases he sees, and the fallout from his exploits in Warsaw, it will be hard for the show to keep up the energy we saw in the first episode.
Performance Worth Watching: Leszek Lichota’s performance as Dawid is equal parts intensity and arrogance. But we’re more curious about what happens with Dawid’s wife Basia (Karolina Gruszka) and son Franek (Filip Kowalewicz), who seem to come second to Dawid after his career.
Parting Shot: The chief of medicine calls a prosecutor friend of his and tells him to look into Dawid.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Anaesthesia is certainly intense. But it asks the viewers to suspend far too much disbelief and starts so huge that it’s hard to know where the show is going to go in the remainder of its season.
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.
