Charité

Sönke Wortmann's Charité launched on Das Erste in March 2017 as the inaugural season of an ongoing prestige-historical drama set inside Berlin's Charité hospital, the central European medical institution founded in 1710 and now among the largest university hospitals in Europe. The series has continued across multiple seasons set in different historical periods (the 1880s, 1943, 1961, 1989), each developed by different writing-directing teams and following a different cohort of doctors, patients and nurses.

The first season is set in the 1880s, the moment Robert Koch, Emil von Behring and Paul Ehrlich are doing the bacteriological research at Charité that will produce the modern theory of infectious disease and the diphtheria antitoxin. Ida Lenze (Alicia von Rittberg) is admitted as a patient, then trains as a nurse, and moves through the wards while the senior physicians' rivalries (petty, jealous, scientifically consequential) accumulate around her. The young Behring (Matthias Koeberlin) and Ehrlich (Christoph Bach) are the season's other emotional centres.

The series's commitment to medical-historical accuracy (actual case histories from Charité's archive, the Koch postulates explained on screen, the discovery sequences that won three Nobel Prizes between 1901 and 1908) makes it the rare prestige drama whose scientific subject matter is its actual interest, not its decorative backdrop. The German Film Critics' Association annual award noted the production design as a particular achievement.