A neurosurgeon at the top of a big-city hospital takes on an operation most colleagues would have refused, and loses. In Anaesthesia, Netflix‘s first Polish medical drama, that failure costs Dr Dawid Łazarz his post and sends him somewhere he never planned to work: a provincial hospital where the staff know each other, the rules are local and nobody is impressed by his reputation.

Leszek Lichota plays Łazarz, and Netflix’s own description of the character does not flatter him. He is brilliant, sure of himself and short on humility, and his habit of bending rules to keep patients alive earns him admiration and controversy in roughly equal measure. The original Polish title is Znieczulenie. Łukasz Ostalski directs, and the cast around Lichota includes Karolina Gruszka, Aleksandra Popławska, Dorota Kolak and Masza Wągrocka.

Early coverage has already filed the series next to The Pitt, the HBO Max emergency-room drama, and Polish critics have added SOR, the hospital series on Prime Video. The comparison is understandable, and it probably misreads where the show comes from. A gifted doctor thrown out of the big city, working among people who did not choose him, judged by an institution that cannot decide whether he is a saviour or a liability: Polish audiences know that story, and they know it with Lichota’s face on it.

Lichota’s second exile

In Forgotten Love, the Netflix film that carried Lichota to viewers outside Poland, he played Rafał Wilczur, the celebrated Warsaw surgeon of Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz’s novel Znachor. Wilczur loses his memory and his name, drifts into the countryside and ends up treating villagers without a licence, which eventually puts him in front of a court. Polish cinema has filmed the story more than once, most famously through Jerzy Hoffman’s version, and every adaptation leans on the same pleasure: watching an expert’s skill survive outside the institution that certified it.

Anaesthesia appears to take that myth and move it into a modern county hospital, with procedures, hierarchies and paperwork. Even the surname does some work: Łazarz is the Polish form of Lazarus, the man brought back from the dead. Łazarz keeps his memory and his licence. What he loses is the protection of a prestigious clinic. The premise suggests the series is less interested in whether he can still operate than in what a smaller hospital does with a man whose talent arrives packaged with his contempt for its routines.

The title carries a second echo for Polish viewers. Bez znieczulenia, Without Anesthesia, is Andrzej Wajda’s 1978 film about a man whose public standing and private life collapse together. Whether Netflix intended the nod or not, the word brings that history with it, and in everyday Polish, saying something “without anaesthesia” means saying it without cushioning. The marketing leans the same way. “Sometimes you have to break the rules to beat death,” Netflix wrote when it announced the premiere, and it described the doctor’s new posting as a medical exile.

The ER connection

The series does not borrow only from Polish memory. Netflix brought in Neal Baer, the paediatrician turned writer-producer who worked on the early seasons of ER before running Law & Order: SVU, as a creative contributor, and medical consultants checked the production against current clinical practice. That matters in a genre whose viewers notice a wrong procedure faster than a wrong line of dialogue. ER built its reputation on that kind of accuracy, and The Pitt has made it fashionable again.

The arrogant-genius template has an American ancestor too. House M.D. ran for years on a diagnostician whose rudeness the hospital tolerated because he was usually right. Doc Martin went the other way, dropping a London surgeon into a Cornish village where his skill mattered less than his manners. Anaesthesia sits closer to the second model in geography and closer to the first in temperament. Its Polish lineage, from Na dobre i na złe on TVP2 to the Czechoslovak Szpital na peryferiach that generations of Poles grew up watching, has always cared as much about the town around the hospital as about the operating theatre.

Who makes it and who is in it

Ostalski previously directed Family Secrets for Netflix. The writing team is led by Dana Łukasińska, who worked on the Netflix series Infamia, with Bartosz Janiszewski, Marcin Ciastoń and Beata Halastra. Jan and Michał Kwieciński produce for Akson Studio.

The cast list reads partly like a reunion. Lichota and Aleksandra Popławska, who plays Jagoda, worked together on HBO’s Wataha (The Pack), the border-guard thriller set in the Bieszczady mountains. Karolina Gruszka, known abroad for David Lynch‘s Inland Empire, plays Basia Łazarz, and Filip Kowalewicz plays Franek Łazarz; the shared surname suggests the doctor’s exile is not his alone, although Netflix has not spelled out the relationships. Dorota Kolak and Krzysztof Stelmaszyk play Wanda and Leszek Kott, Masza Wągrocka plays Ada Dąbrowska, and Gamou Fall, Hugo Tarres, Zbigniew Suszyński, Mariusz Bonaszewski and Marcin Czarnik complete the ensemble.

Why a county hospital

The setting is the most Polish choice in the package. For many patients outside the big cities, the local county hospital is the first and sometimes the only door, and it works with fewer specialists and tighter resources than the university clinics a neurosurgeon like Łazarz is used to. A drama that sends a big-city star into that building is, whether it says so or not, a drama about which patients get the best doctor and what a system will forgive when the best doctor breaks its rules.

Netflix’s synopsis frames that tension directly: Łazarz’s confidence makes him an exceptional doctor and also puts him on a collision course with the system, with medical ethics and with the weight of holding other people’s lives in his hands. The premise points to a case-by-case procedural with a larger argument running underneath it. Each saved patient becomes evidence for his methods, each mistake evidence against them, and the series will have to decide how long a hospital can live on the first kind of evidence while the second keeps piling up.

That is the question Anaesthesia opens and its synopsis cannot answer. If a surgeon’s talent depends on ignoring the rules, the institution that hires him is betting that he will be right every time. The series begins with the one time he was not.

Release date, episodes and where to watch

Anaesthesia premieres on Netflix on 4 November 2026, and its first season runs eight episodes. It is one of twelve Polish titles Netflix announced for its 2026 slate, alongside the third season of 1670, the period adaptation of Bolesław Prus’s The Doll and Colours of Evil: Black.

Is Anaesthesia based on a true story? Netflix has not presented it as based on real events. It is an original drama, written with input from medical consultants.

Who stars in Anaesthesia? Leszek Lichota leads as neurosurgeon Dawid Łazarz, with Karolina Gruszka, Aleksandra Popławska, Dorota Kolak, Masza Wągrocka and Krzysztof Stelmaszyk.

Is Anaesthesia a Polish series? Yes. Its original title is Znieczulenie, its original language is Polish, and Netflix calls it its first Polish medical drama.

Where can I watch Anaesthesia? On Netflix, where it streams as a Netflix original series.