Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Under Fire’ on Netflix, A Belgian Drama About A Dysfunctional Team of Firefighters

There’s no shortage of TV dramas that are based around emergency response teams. Shows like ER and all the Chicago shows (Med, Fire, PD, take your pick of essential workers!) have created an exciting genre out of the people that Mr. Rogers would call “the helpers.” The Belgian series Under Fire falls into this category, but it has the luxury of not being a network TV show, which means two things: swearing, and cinematically-filmed rescue scenes that don’t skimp on heart-pounding, dramatic visuals.

UNDER FIRE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An older man dresses for his job as a firefighter as his wife hands him the lunch she has prepared for the day. It’s obviously a scene that has played out between the two of them for years. “Are you ready for your last day?” she asks her husband. As they exchange pleasantries and he finishes getting dressed, she kisses him and says, “Come home to me,” to which he replies, “Always, love.” I mean, a man’s last day of work at a dangerous job and he promises his wife he’ll come home to her? He’s totally gonna die before the end of the episode, isn’t he?

The Gist: So, minor spoiler alert, but the man getting dressed for the day is Lieutenant Patrick Sinnaeve (Sam Louwyck), the man in charge of the East Bank fire station located in Ostend, Belgium, and he does not die on his last day of work. The men and women at East Bank are what you’d call a motley crew; despite the fact that they are typically first to respond to many local emergencies, they break the rules! They can’t be trusted! They’re heroes who don’t follow protocol! Orlando Foncke (Louis Talpe) is one of the bravest on the squad but he defies orders and goes rogue whenever he sees fit, and we learn early on that his personal life is also a disaster. The station’s adjutant, Steve, has a drinking problem that causes him to miss work regularly, leading to his suspension. All of this bad-boy behavior has put the station at risk, and Sinnaeve is the one to pay the price; in order to save the jobs of his crew, he agrees to take a desk job at the command center and leave his team in the hands of a new Lieutentant, Dominique Meersman (Lien De Grave).

Sinnaeve was well-loved, so when he shocks his team by revealing his new job which starts like, NOW, and introduces Meersman, no one is happy, partly because they fear change, and partly because most of the men on the crew, but especially Orlando, are misogynists who mock Meersman for doing the job in heels, blah blah, women are weak, you get the point. After a harrowing scene in a burning building at the beginning of the first episode, Sinnaeve announces his departure and reluctantly takes his leave, but it’s clear that his heart will always be at the East Bank station.

So there you have the general interpersonal drama that will likely inform most of the plot for this season, and some of the action we’ll see play out, too. Because this is after all, a show about firefighters, and in each episode there are high-stakes rescues and dramatic moments of peril that will make your heart race.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? At its core, Under Fire is a drama with fleshed out characters wrapped in an action show. It definitely has hints of Denis Leary’s Rescue Me and Chicago Fire thanks to the firefighting drama, and it also reminds me of SEAL Team for the way it handles high-stakes missions and rescues.

Our Take: My palms were legitimately sweating throughout both rescue scenes that were featured in the first episode. One featured a fire set accidentally by two weed growers whose secret drug lab in a back room of their apartment caught fire, and as the East Bank squad broke into the apartment, they faced off against one of the growers, a belligerent man who attacked one of the firefighters, and who Orlando had to tackle and carry down to the police. This gets him in hot water with the higher ups when he’s accused of abandoning his post at the scene of the fire in favor of basically making a citizen’s arrest. ROGUE!

After Meersman joins the crew, the squad responds to a second emergency call: a hot air balloon operator has died from a heart attack in mid-air, and his body and his three (living) passengers were stranded in their basket after crashing into a construction crane that looks to be about 30 stories high, dangling from the balloon’s thin fabric. Meersman tells Orlando that their protocol is to wait until a climbing crew arrives and he is not to initiate a rescue, but again, Orlando goes ROGUE and climbs up the crane to secure the balloon and save them, but not before the fabric of the balloon starts to rip, the three remaining ballooners dramatically throw the dead body of the balloon operator out of the basket to everyone’s horror. Meersman is forced to reckon with the fact that Orlando saved these people and if she had continued to wait for a climbing squad, they would have died. (Lesson learned: sometimes going ROGUE is okay?) The pace of the action is drawn out and each rescue scene takes up nearly ten minutes of the show’s 46-minute run time, but it’s done a real-time way that lets the action and tension build naturally.

While the drama between squad personnel seems fairly predictable from the outset, it’s the rescue scenes that make the show worth watching.

Sex and Skin: None in the pilot, but considering there are some F-bombs, an inter-squad romance, and there’s some drama between exes, I wouldn’t be surprised if people have sex and it further complicates their already complicated lives.

Parting Shot: Meersman arrives home after a harrowing first day on the job. She played it too by-the-books on her first assignment at the hot air balloon, which led to a chaotic and near-fatal situation, and a confrontation with Orlando who cursed her out for playing it safe and adhering to protocol. (Meanwhile, she reamed out Orlando for disobeying her orders, despite the fact that he managed to make a heroic rescue.) She knows she’s gotten herself into a shit situation, and it’s only just begun. She drops down to a squat, lets her ponytail out – Hollywood’s visual cue for a woman needing to relax – and she drops her head, realizing that this is merely the first day of the rest of her life.

Sleeper Star: As Orlando Foncke, Belgian actor Louis Talpe is the focal point of the show and he’s definitely got that sexy, damaged guy thing down. Based on his looks and general intensity, he gives me serious Richard Madden vibes, and like Madden, I can see him crossing over into more mainstream American fare and becoming a star. (He has already appeared in the ABC series Of Kings and Prophets).

Most Pilot-y Line: “Don’t let the men get to you,” Noelle, one of the only other women working in the fire station, tells Lieutenant Meersman, after Meersman receives the cold shoulder and a cruel tongue-lashing from one of her Sergeants. The two only just met earlier that day, and the line sets up not just the kind of misogyny that the women must face working in this world of men, but perhaps hints at an alliance between the women.

Our Call: STREAM IT! On paper, Under Fire sounds like it might just be Chicago Fire by way of Belgium, but its truly gripping and cinematic action sequences take it up a notch and make it a worthy binge.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.