(Credits: Netflix)

We have all seen the glamorous side of hospital chaos on Netflix. The perfectly lit corridors, impossibly attractive surgeons, heartbreak in the operating room, and romance by the vending machine. Medical dramas like Grey’s Anatomy, The Good Doctor, Pulse, and New Amsterdam have trained us to expect tears, cliffhangers, and CPR in slow motion.

Now think of a world where none of that happens. Have you ever imagined what happens when you strip all of that away? No love triangles or season-long arcs and no monologues in the rain. Just a body on a stretcher, a race against time, and the quiet urgency of saving a life.

That is exactly what Critical: Between Life and Death on Netflix is about. And this show does not flinch. Released on 23 July 2025, this new Netflix docuseries has already climbed to number seven on the Netflix Global Top 10 Series list, and it is unlike anything else on the platform right now.

Filmed inside four of London’s busiest trauma centres over the course of 21 days, the show captures real-life emergencies. Over 40 cameras embedded in hospital wards, operating theatres, and ambulance bays have covered the whole show. There are no actors, no scripts, and no dramatic voiceovers explaining what to feel. It is all real, and somehow, that makes it more gripping than anything fiction could offer.

Produced by the team behind 24 Hours in A&E, Critical takes documentary storytelling to its starkest form. The camera does not cut away from tough moments. It stays with the trauma teams as they work through the fog of panic, urgency, and impossible decisions. The show trusts the viewer to stay with it, to absorb the chaos without commentary, and to find meaning in the silences.

And the silences say a lot. In one scene, a trauma team prepares to receive a crash victim whose injuries are described over the radio in rapid clinical shorthand. There is no music. Just the sound of wheels rolling, monitors beeping, and someone quietly saying, “Ready.” The entire sequence feels like a pressure cooker, and it is happening in real time.

This kind of access is rare, and it is powerful. Critical is not stylised or emotionally edited. It does not offer character backstories or dramatic resolutions. Instead, it shows how human lives can change or end within minutes and how doctors must keep moving, case after case, with little room to process what just happened.

But for all its realism, the show is not cold. On the contrary, it is full of quiet empathy. You see it in the way a nurse steadies a patient’s breathing or in the pause a consultant takes before giving a family bad news. These small, human gestures land harder because nothing else is trying to steal your attention.

What makes Critical: Between Life and Death feel so new is not just its fly-on-the-wall format but also its complete refusal to dramatise real suffering. It does not manipulate the moment. It just shows it. That confidence in the audience, in the subject, and in the medium is what sets it apart from everything else in the genre.

And audiences are responding. Within days of release, the show has surged up Netflix’s global rankings. For a docuseries with no celebrity names, no scandal, and no traditional plot, that kind of traction is a clear sign that viewers are hungry for something honest, even when it is difficult to watch.

Critical is not bingeable comfort television. It is something far rarer. A show that respects its subject enough not to soften it. And that, it turns out, is exactly what people are showing up for.