First Responders (Åreakuten) — Season 1
First Responders (Åreakuten) is a show squarely in the MHz Choice wheelhouse. The work-centered drama focuses on a half-dozen or so characters working at a medical trauma center in Sweden. As a procedural, it has the familiar beats of serial television. A new case can introduce new characters. and the private lives of those working can be explored leisurely as time permits. But it also has small but telling differences between the settings which keep the episodes from feeling too familiar.
For example, racial and gender stereotypes are blurred. The young, black woman (Nadja Halid) is a doctor. The nordic blonde is feisty, not icy, and she runs point on many of the emergency calls (Tiril Eeg-Henriksen). In the first episode, when a drunk driver causes a high-speed accident, there is a surprising (and refreshing) amount of candor in the responders’ anger towards him. In an American show, there would be some strains of conflict based on how the staff are (or are not) supposed to feel. That directness is echoed in the way an administrative wife expresses her attitude at her husband hiring a young protege. Sure, early seasons of serials are prone to be exposition-heavy, so pilots tend to have a bit more telling than showing. But even taking that into account, there seems to a different level of emotional self-awareness in the characters that makes them feel more…adult than the stunted corollaries of, say Chicago Med. American television characters tend to have adult problems but adolescent emotions and adolescent reactions to those problems.
Does the preceding paragraph read as a tepid endorsement? If so, that’s not intentional. It’s meant to be descriptive, not evaluative — the show is, I think, aspiring to be familiar. That’s a selling point for television in the binge-watching age, and with so many platforms and choices available, few new shows dare to innovate formally or narratively. First Responders exists primarily as content, and on that level, it is pleasant and enjoyable, not demanding too much of our attention. It understands that most viewers have more appointments than there are appoint-viewing shows to fill them.
To extend that metaphor, think of MHz Choice as the speed-dating venue. There are dozens of shows lined up, and you can cycle quickly through the pilots to schedule your next couple of dates. You can watch all ten episodes of First Responders in a weekend or spread them out to shorten the time until Cobra Kai Season 5 drops. Foreign shows are an untapped reservoir of content, and at last then $10 per month, MHz Choice offers an excellent way of sampling many of these shows without shelling out for another DVD box set that contains stuff you will probably only watch once.
