An adaptation of Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital has been in production for years. In fact, it was once very nearly a chapter of Ryan Murphy’s “American Crime Story” series with, of course, Sarah Paulson in the lead role. But that version fell apart, ending up in the offices of Carlton Cuse (“LOST”), who brought on the brilliant John Ridley (“12 Years a Slave”) to collaborate. Apple TV+ was interested in that version of this story, and the first three episodes premiere on the streaming service this Friday, just short of 17 years after Katrina made landfall.
Ridley and Cuse set up the premiere of “Five Days at Memorial” with actual news footage of the impending storm, sometimes cutting it directly into scenes. For example, an old man looks out a window at the increasing chaos and it’s edited together with actual shots of the storm. It helps add veracity to the early scenes, which, again, play out like a horror movie because we know the trauma that’s about to unfold. The show takes an ensemble approach to what happened next at Memorial Hospital, bouncing around the hospital as it intercuts people dealing with increasingly impossible situations such as Dr. Anna Pou (Vera Farmiga), an incident commander named Susan Mulderick (Cherry Jones), Dr. Bryant King (Cornelius Smith Jr.), nurse manager Karen Wynn (Adepero Oduye), and many more.
Some might forget that the end of the storm was really the beginning. At first, it appeared that the brunt of Katrina had spared New Orleans, and “Five Days at Memorial” wrestles with how many mistakes were made after the hurricane, in those days when the levees broke, water started to rise, and everyone who should have acted couldn’t figure out what to do next. When the generators went out, nurses and doctors scrambled to get patients out, but the horrendous governmental response to the crisis didn’t help, and neither did the dangerous conditions all around the hospital. By the fourth day, conversations were unfolding about what to do about pain management. In one scene, different color armbands are put on patients depending on if they thought they could be saved or not. As Wynn says, “In those last days at Memorial, all there was was misery.”