Series: Red Band Society

Source: VOX

English title:  Red Band Society
German title: Club der roten Bänder

Red Band Society is an American teen medical comedy-drama television series […] Based on the Catalan drama series Polseres vermelles, the series is a dramedy focused on a group of teenagers living together as patients in a hospital’s pediatric ward. This is the first medical series to focus on hospital patients.
[Source: Wikipedia]

This TV series also aired in Germany quite a while ago, with two seasons – the first one is already aired and the second season is in progress of being aired.

The series is about a club that forms from hospital patients at teenager age, and those are a mix of cancer patients, bulemia, someone with a heart problem (who, en course of season one, dies), someone who had broken both of his legs and has a mental disability, as well as one young boy that had an accident and is in coma for years and then wakes up.

The series shows how life happens in the hospital, based on a real story that was then formed into a book – and it really is nothing for someone who easily is touched or gets emotional really fast – unless you like to torture yourself when feeling with the people in the series and feeling how they feel and yes…I have shed some tears. Because it is far away from those standard series that you can find everywhere on TV – this is why I am surpised that it is being aired on one of those TV channels that usually have a not too deep programme to offer to the watchers.

I stumbled across this series by accident back in the days, when I was zapping through the channels and wondered if this was yet again some niveau lacking series and realized pretty soon, that this was different – with depth, that it really made you feel instead of turning off your mind. Surely there will be peope bitching that it is just a series and that it is something for girls only, but I disagree because it touches a part of life we´d like to not think about. Illness, and not of the easy kind. no flu, no cold, no sneezing or anything – it is cancer, eating disorders, being in a coma for ages after an accident.

Especially the cancer part touches me, having lost dear family members to cancer and having been in touch with this illness quite a lot due to this – and it makes me just so sad to really have it in front of my eyes how the battle is for teenagers. Surely this ain´t pure reality, it is a nicer version of it, but still it does give a glimpse. And the ups and downs, all the hope and the downfalls – it just reminds me so much on the times when you are waiting chemo after chemo of a person for new blood results, you are happy when they´re good and then when you think it´ll be all right, then it all falls apart. And you start from new, with all the fears being restarted and all hope reset…

But it also shows how very different people can bond, first just because there is noone else and then because there´s a friendship growing, the realization that friendship is strength and that together you can achieve far more than when being the lonely one who pushes away everyone who wants to be supportive of any kind. And at the same time it shows how love can separate these bonds again, and how to realize that in the end friendship is just such a precious good that it stands above all possible relationships…

…I could go on and on and on but nothing will be describing how this series makes me really fully feel and what it shows – so you really should be giving this series a try and check it out yourself!