Coming home from the hospital and seeing your own show sitting on Prime Video is a pretty wild full-circle moment.
Dr. Joel Bervell, the Ghanaian-American physician and science communicator known online as the “Medical Mythbuster,” has brought his animated children’s medical series, The Doctor Is In, to Prime Video while continuing to work through residency.
Bervell created the series to make health and science easier for children to understand while also giving young viewers more representation in medicine. On his website, he describes The Doctor Is In as an animated series created to make complex medical topics and history accessible to a wider audience.
The show follows Bervell as a pediatrician alongside Leland, a curious five-year-old patient who asks questions about the body, health, and medicine. The cast also includes animated medical tools like Otto the doctor’s bag, Sammie the stethoscope, and Zada the X-ray machine.
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The idea grew out of Bervell’s own experience of not seeing many doctors who looked like him represented in children’s media. He has said that animation gave him a way to create the kind of show he wished he had growing up, one where kids could see themselves reflected in medicine and science.
The project first gained momentum through a crowdfunding campaign that raised nearly $62,000 before catching the attention of YouTube Health. Bervell later partnered with the platform to develop the digital series, combining live-action segments with animation and educational storytelling.
The first episode officially debuted online in 2025, with Bervell describing the project as a “labor of love” designed to help children feel seen, heard, and inspired in their healthcare journeys.
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Now, while balancing the demands of residency, Bervell is celebrating another milestone as the series reaches an even wider audience through Prime Video.
For someone who built his platform around making medicine more understandable and inclusive, seeing The Doctor Is In move from an idea to a streaming platform is one more step toward the representation he wanted to create in the first place.
Congratulations, Dr. Joel Bervell!
