Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Five Days At Memorial’ On Apple TV+, A Fact-Based Drama About The Tragedy At A New Orleans Hospital During Hurricane Katrina

Five Days At Memorial is a scripted miniseries based on Sheri Fink’s nonfiction book of the same name. It details the questionable decision making at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans that occurred after the hospital flooded in Katrina’s aftermath and knocked out its backup generators; critical patients were left behind during the mass evacuation on the fifth day, with some of them possibly being euthanized. The drama goes over the five days where the power was out before the mass evacuation as well as the investigation into the tragedy.

FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Archival footage of Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into New Orleans on August 29, 2005.

The Gist: The first episode at first shows investigators taking a boat through the flood waters to the abandoned hospital and finding 45 bodies wrapped and placed in the hospital’s chapel, 13 days after the storm. Then we flash back to August 29, with Katrina bearing down on New Orleans.

It’s the first hurricane for Dr. Anna Pou (Vera Farmiga); the nurses in her department point out that her water bottles and tuna won’t be enough to ride out the storm. Dr. Horace Baltz (Robert Pine), who is in charge of the ER, is taking in evacuees as per usual, despite the objections of the hospital administrator, Dr. Ewing Cook (W. Earl Brown). Nurse manager Susan Mulderick (Cherry Jones) is the incident commander for the storm, and she has to rally the staff when things start going sideways: Windows break, the sky bridge between buildings shakes in the wind, and flood waters start pouring in the basement.

There’s also the matter of the nursing home on the 7th floor, which is considered its own entity. Pregnant nurse Diane Robichaux (Julie Ann Emery) calls Mulderick when water starts pushing into her floor, and Mulderick starts to realize that things are about to get serious. One problem: There’s nothing in the very thick incident manual that lays out a flooding evacuation plan. Representing the very critical patients on that floor is the mother of Karen Wynn (Adepero Oduye), who stays with her while the storm rages.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? John Ridley, who co-created Five Days At Memorial with Carlton Cuse (Lost), created a series for ABC called American Crime that has a lot of the same tone and feel as this show. The only difference is that Five Days At Memorial is “based on actual events.”

Our Take: There are shows that we’ve reviewed that have everything you might want in a show, but the show is still difficult to watch. It’s usually shows like Five Days At Memorial, which are based on actual events, and examines a tragedy that hit the nation hard when it occurred.

The performances in the first episode of Memorial are all fantastic, especially Farmiga as Dr. Pou, who’s new to hurricane duty at the hospital and Jones as Mulderick, the veteran nurse manager who has to make decisions on the fly that might not always be the right ones. Robert Pine also puts in a fine performance as the avuncular Dr. Baltz.

We also have to give credit to Ridley and Cuse’s writing team, who don’t try to overdramatize what’s already a harrowing story. We get personal glimpses of people who were affected, but they don’t take the usual “disaster film” route of trying to make us like people that may or not make it by the end of the event. We’re talking about a real tragedy and real lives, borne out by a natural disaster that NOLA is still trying to recover from, 17 years later. It was a good choice to skip the melodrama and just show how tough it was in that hospital once the storm hit and the levees broke.

Despite all of that, though, it’s hard to call Five Days At Memorial “entertaining.” It’s actually a grim, difficult show to watch. If you are at all familiar with what happened at Memorial in Katrina’s aftermath, you know that the series is going to be about the agonizing decisions the hospital’s staff had to make to prioritize evacuating the people who had the best chance of surviving. There’s no one here to root for or against, since what we’re seeing is humans making these decisions under the most extreme duress one can imagine outside a war zone. And there’s no happy ending.

Series like this can still be compelling (Chernobyl comes to mind), but “compelling” doesn’t mean that it’s easy to watch. Viewers will really have to figure out if they want to spend about six hours over eight episodes with this story.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: As we hear Dr. Pou pray, the power flickers out as the flood waters destroy the generators. “God help us,” we hear Pou whisper.

Sleeper Star: As we mentioned, Pine is great as the old pro Dr. Baltz, as is Cornelius Smith Jr. as Dr. Bryant King, a young physician that’s dealing with the chaos in the ER as they move evacuees away from the flooding.

Most Pilot-y Line: When told that if the hospital floods, they’ll have to evacuate, Mulderick says, “Evacuate? How?” The building operations guy, Eric Yancovich (Joel Keller — the Canadian actor, not yours truly) replies, “I don’t know! You’re the incident commander!” Thanks, pal.

Our Call: STREAM IT. As we said, Five Days At Memorial is a difficult watch, but if you know that going in, it’s a well-written and well-acted treatise on how decisions made in extreme conditions can lead to tragedy, even if intentions were good.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.