Five Days at Memorial

Ethical ambiguity is the beating heart of Five Days at Memorial, the John Ridley and Carlton Cuse penned Apple TV+ medical drama unpicking the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina on the New Orleans Memorial Medical Center.

The series, which is based on the book of the same name by Sheri Fink, is structured into two parts. The first takes us through the increasingly desperate circumstances of the hospital staff as they face extreme heat, dwindling resources and increasingly impossible decisions in their fight to provide comfort to their patients over the five days of the storm, while the final three episodes of its eight-part run depict the legal impacts of the events on Dr Anna Pou (Vera Farmiga), a senior doctor on site. In structuring the serial as such, Ridley and Cuse have developed a drama of equal parts character-driven jeopardy, and prescient political and philosophical contemplation.

The aforementioned decisions that fall upon the caregivers are the crux of the show’s dramatic tension, a tension so deftly built upon through Ridley and Cuse’s absolute avoidance of moral conclusions. Grey is the optimal shade through which the characters and their dilemmas are presented, trusting the audience’s emotional intelligence to draw their own judgments. There are no heroes or villains in this story, at least not in the traditional polarisation of such character functions, only individuals under extreme duress trying to meet their oath-bound duty of care to their patients in impossible conditions.

Matthew Davies’s painstakingly precise recreation of the hospital as it appeared in 2005 and excellently raw performances across the board combine to immerse the viewer in a brutal depiction of these circumstances, a depiction which feels particularly pointed in the aftermath of a pandemic which has stretched medical staff to their limits the world over. Also pointed is the picture of a health service left woefully underprepared for disaster by a corporatised system in which profit is king and lives are expendable.

While this prescience lends Five Days at Memorial an almost accidental poignance, it is no less real, and only serves to compliment the very deliberate considerations at the series’ core.

Matthew McMillan

Five Days at Memorial is released on Apple TV+ on 12^th August 2022.

Watch the trailer for Five Days at Memorial here: