'Five Days at Memorial' is almost impossible to watch at times. Why you should anyways

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic

August 8, 2022 at 9:00 AM·4 min read

Oops!
Something went wrong.
Please try again later.

“Five Days at Memorial” is unlike any limited series I recall watching — exceptionally well made, beautifully acted and so unrelentingly dismal and depressing it’s almost impossible to watch at times.

So should you watch it anyway? I think so, if only as a reminder of how so many things went so wrong during and after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. We need these reminders, and the anger they engender — ideally so that the mistakes aren’t repeated.

John Ridley and Carlton Cuse created the eight-episode series, streaming on Apple TV+ on Aug. 12. It’s based on Sheri Fink’s book “Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital.”

It is meticulous in recounting the anticipation of the storm, the sense of relief when the worst of it missed New Orleans and the mounting horror when the levees broke and flooded the city. The rising water meant death and destruction, and Memorial Medical Center had more than its fair share of both.

Spaced out: Losing yourself in the NASA photos, the perfect antidote to doomscrolling

Vera Farmiga's performance as a doctor is empathetic and inscrutable

The series starts with the discovery of 45 bodies in the hospital’s chapel days after the storm. Starting in media res is an overused technique, but it makes sense here. We go back in time to find out how the dead got there and then further in time for the aftermath and the reckoning. The question the series poses is simple: Were these critically ill patients euthanized?

The answers are anything but.

At the center of that storm is Dr. Anna Pau, played by Vera Farmiga with empathy and inscrutability. As the hospital almost literally falls apart around her, Pau will administer what state investigators believe is a lethal cocktail of drugs to some of the patients who can’t be evacuated. Is it murder? Or an act of caring?

Changing channels: Why Javier Soto decided to leave Arizona's Family after 18 years

The series doesn’t provide easy judgment. Ridley and Cuse detail the lack of preparation. Susan Mulderick (Cherry Jones, excellent), the nursing director and incident commander, learns early on how ill-prepared the hospital is — for instance, there’s no plan for evacuation from a flood.

And of course the U.S. government fell flat on its face with its response. If you’re waiting for someone to tell you what to do, Mulderick is told, it’s not going to happen. Because no one knows what to do.

The filmmakers spare little when showing the increasingly brutal conditions at the hospital as the flood waters rise and the power goes out. The misery and despair are unimaginable. Meanwhile, on the seventh floor, a private hospital within Memorial called LifeCare also struggles with the same decisions as those below. One decision in particular is heartbreaking.

Doctors and nurses rush infants from the neonatal intensive care unit to a helipad to be evacuated from a hospital surrounded by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in a scene from “Five Days at Memorial.” The eight-episode series, co-written and executive-produced by John Ridley, premieres on Apple TV+ Aug. 12.

Michael Gaston and Molly Hager are excellent as investigators

Rumors abound of looting and assaults outside the hospital. Racism, either implicit or worse, fuels a lot of them — something not lost on Dr. Bryant King (Cornelius Smith Jr.), one of the few Black doctors at the hospital.

It is no exaggeration to say that the whole place just goes to hell.

Back at it: Troy Kotsur, Oscar-winning deaf actor from Mesa, set to star in new series

The series switches gears in the final episodes, in which investigators for the Louisiana attorney general’s office (Michael Gaston and Molly Hager; I’d definitely watch an entire show about them working cases) look into what happened. They’re met with stonewalling in places they expect — and don’t.

What ultimately happens is public record, easily found (or you could read Fink’s book). This isn’t a thriller building up to an exciting climax. Instead it is a detailed and harrowing account of abject failure.

Most of us, thankfully, watched the events of Katrina from the outside looking in. Even that perspective was bad enough. “Five Days in Memorial” switches the point of view and we see it from the inside — the breakdown of pretty much everything, the unimaginable choices put before people, the utter lack of any kind of meaningful plan to stave off disaster.

And it is so much worse.