Apple TV+'s Five Days At Memorial explores 'when doctors are forced to play god'

On August 29 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near the Louisiana city of New Orleans. It battered the city with high winds and floods, leaving death and destruction in its wake. By August 30, 80% of the city was flooded. Some areas were under four metres of water.

Thankfully, the vast majority of the city's residents were evacuated before Katrina struck, but at least 100,000 people remained in the city. That figure includes some 2,000 patients, doctors, nurses and civilians at the Memorial Medical Center in Uptown New Orleans.

The story of those fateful days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Memorial hospital is now being told in the new Apple TV+ miniseries Five Days At Memorial, based on the book by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Sheri Fink.

"Nothing compares to it. I don't think anybody can say they've been through a hurricane as bad as that," says Robert Pine, 81, who plays Dr Horace Baltz, one of the longest serving doctors at Memorial.

"I remember when it happened, watching the news... you could feel nothing but empathy for these people and what they were going through."

Subject to lashing winds, catastrophic flooding and a loss of power, Memorial was surrounded by floodwater, had no sanitation, and began to experience indoor temperatures up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit - 43C - leaving patients and staff alike in a desperate situation. The evacuation was slow and delayed, and it wasn't clear if the hospital's sickest patients would survive the ordeal.

When the crisis was over, 45 bodies were discovered in the makeshift morgue at the hospital: more than from any hospital of a similar size in the city. What happened at Memorial in those days of disaster? Why were there so many bodies? And, crucially, were the deaths of those people hastened by the very hospital staff appointed to care for them?

Primetime Emmy-nominated Bates Motel star Vera Farmiga stars as Dr Anna Pou, the highly-respected head and neck cancer surgeon who stayed at Memorial throughout the crisis to help patients and was later arrested on accusations of second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder, accusations that she and her colleagues euthanised patients trapped at the hospital after the storm with lethal doses of drugs.

"Anna Pou was revered by her patients," Farmiga, 48, says.

"She is the epitome of a good doctor: a brilliant, composed, unassuming woman who sometimes can come across a little aloof, like a lot of surgeons. The truth about her is that she is all about the work. And, she's fanatically committed to her patients.

"When everything, and I mean everything, falls apart at Memorial, she is one of the people that steps up and quietly takes charge. Anna chose to stay and look after her patients and to help others. She is the type of person who becomes calmer the worse things get."

While a grand jury chose not to indict Pou in 2007, the story of what happened at Memorial continues to raise ethical and legal questions around health care professionals' roles and responsibilities in disaster situations.

"It's a horrible circumstance when doctors are forced to play God," says Five Days at Memorial's executive producer, writer and director Carlton Cuse, best known for his work on Lost.

"That's part of what we explore here: the ethics of what happens in a crisis when tough decisions have to be made about who gets resources and who doesn't."

During the Covid-19 pandemic, there were fears that ventilators would have to be rationed, that doctors would have to make impossible calls about who would be ventilated and who would not - which is why Cuse felt now was the right time to tell the story of Memorial on television.

"I think it's important to recognise that what we're going through has context, that there's history here, that there are other examples of these kinds of circumstances," he says.

"I hope we can put ourselves in a position to do better. To put medical workers in a position of having to make really untenable decisions about limited resources in a medical crisis... there's just no right answer there. It's a horrible circumstance.

"And I think, with some planning, and with some forethought, we wouldn't find ourselves in these circumstances."

At a 2007 rally marking the first anniversary of Pou's arrest, speakers warned that medics could leave in their droves if a doctor was indicted after serving in a disaster - and the treatment of doctors and nurses is very much a hot topic on both sides of the pond post-pandemic.

"I wanted to work on Five Days At Memorial because it's about everything that's happening now," says Cherry Jones, 65, who plays Memorial's Director of Nursing Susan Mulderick.

"Whether it's the climate or racial injustice, or our health care workers now being our soldiers on the front lines over and over and over again.

"During Covid, my little hospital in Henry County, Tennessee went from 800 on staff to 300 now," Jones adds.

"Healthcare workers are our soldiers now. And I will say part of the reason why this works as well as it does is because Carlton Cuse and John Ridley are honourable men, and they understand the importance of a story like this to be put on television.

"So people on their sofas will think and ask these hard questions, all these questions about ethics, and people are going to be debating it for years to come."

But Five Days At Memorial is not just a cautionary tale about the healthcare profession: it's also a warning about climate change.

On July 19 2022 the UK recorded its hottest day on record at 40.3C, and this July has been the driest in England since 1911. The warning about the impact of extreme weather and natural disaster is one we should all heed.

"John Ridley and I, we talked about how history rhymes," says Cuse.

"I think we all hope that people learn from these kinds of experiences, but yet it seems to be hard to do that. With global warming, and with the rising number of extreme events like this, are we capable of preparing? Are we capable, as a human species, of being ready the next time these things happen, or to kind of take the actions necessary to maybe mitigate these events?

"I don't know."

Five Days At Memorial is coming to Apple TV+ on Friday, August 12.