Five Days At Memorial review: Drama tells true story of Hurricane Katrina disaster-Josh Stephenson-Entertainment – Metro

The drama explains how 45 patients lost their lives when the hospital was flooded in the 2005 disaster (Picture: Russ Martin)

It’s incredible how little drama has been made out of Hurricane Katrina. Here is a natural disaster meeting a shambolic government response that killed nearly 2,000 people and left millions homeless across Louisiana.

It’s a tragedy that deserves to be told again and again to learn the lessons from it – and yet, apart from HBO’s wonderful Treme – there’s been a somewhat ironic drought of TV dramas depicting the events of August 2005. Well, until now.

Five Days At Memorial re-tells the shocking events at the Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans where 45 people – all patients – lost their lives when the hospital was flooded, power systems failed and they were forced to wait days to be evacuated.

The series asks a simple question: how was this allowed to happen? And, pleasingly, it doesn’t offer a straightforward answer.

Written and directed by John Ridley, the writer behind 12 Years A Slave, the show explores the institutional failings at the hospital itself.

Vera Farmiga gives a sterling performance as a healthcare worker forced to play God(Picture: Russ Martin)

The medical centre had no emergency procedures for flooding (Picture: Russ Martin)

You might not expect a medical centre to have emergency procedures for a once-in-a-generation event, but not even for flooding?

Moreover, the local government response, which left a city to fend for itself for days without communication between departments, was laughably poor.

You’ll find yourself screaming at your television with equal parts anger and horror as things go from bad to worse to disastrous.

Each episode takes up one day at the hospital, with later episodes delving into the investigations which followed the hurricane, and this structure makes Five Days At Memorial feel like a socially conscious version of ER – with a dollop of The Day After Tomorrow thanks to its impressive weather effects.

There’s some sterling performances. Vera Farmiga, Cherry Jones and Julie Ann Emery sometimes have to deal with the odd clunky bit of dialogue but all are equally fantastic as healthcare professionals being forced to play God, having to decide who lives and who dies.

The patients, too, are treated with the respect they deserve.

Some of the more personal stories fall somewhat flat – the show’s roots as a searing non-fiction novel come to the fore when it tries to be a little lighter in tone – and the show does lose some power when it gets bogged down in court procedurals in later episodes.

But that doesn’t detract from Five Days At Memorial being a fascinating look at an under-explored topic.

Streaming from Friday on Apple TV+.

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