Peacock's Dr. Death clings to the wrong part of a true story

Mic

"As a society, for better or worse, we're pretty accustomed to witnessing horror," says Chloe Stillwell. "We've been seeing images — both real on the news, and fictional in the created worlds of storytellers like Ryan Murphy and Jordan Peele — for long enough that it's hard to shock audiences. But the much-anticipated NBC Peacock adaptation of Wondery's hit podcast Dr. Death uses gratuitous violence that borders on emotionally abusive to its audience — and loses an opportunity to maximize the best of two mediums. Dr. Death begins with a gruesome surgery. And then another. In the first 15 minutes of the premiere alone, the viewer is asked to watch as Dr. Duntsch (played by Joshua Jackson) cuts his patients open, and loudly clamors at bone with hammers and screws nails into soft tissue while blood squirts and pools on the floor. Yes, this is what happened in real life with the aforementioned Christopher Duntsch, who permanently injured or killed 33 of his 38 patients, and is now in prison. But asking the viewer to viscerally consume the horrors he inflicted on real people felt like a cheap way to begin what is a much bigger story — how did this man end up in operating rooms, and why did he do what he did? To add insult to injury, the second episode begins with Alec Baldwin's character re-watching a corrective surgery his character Robert Henderson had done on one of Duntsch's patients, intimately detailing the carnage out loud."

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• Dr. Death has a superb cast, but it tests viewers' patience over eight episodes: "Instead of reshaping audience perceptions in any meaningful way, Dr. Death is an eight-hour affirmation of every fear and insecurity that you have about surgery and, as such, is more like shooting fish in a barrel than shooting a pressurized SCUBA tank in a toothy fish’s mouth," says Daniel Fienberg. "Perhaps that’s why either familiarity or fatigue set in after around five episodes of Dr. Death, which probably should have been capped at that length anyway. It’s still generally watchable and largely persuasive in its paranoia-enhancing depiction of the medical-industrial complex, playing like the best season yet of NBCUniversal’s Dirty John franchise, even if nobody chose to apply that banner here." He adds: "The actors are also working at a level above the mechanical script. It hardly matters if the series around him understands Duntsch, because Jackson plays him with chilling consistency, so committed to his character’s commitment to his own brilliance and infallibility that you occasionally find yourself believing. I’m not sure Baldwin and Slater have more than one character note apiece to play — Baldwin gets 'mature,' set against Slater’s more wisecracking, less inept version of Duntsch’s swagger — but the co-stars are clearly enjoying playing off of past roles, whether it’s Baldwin’s iconic embodiment of God Complex in Malice or Slater’s own stint as a degree-flaunting villain in the second Dear John season. The women, mostly Robb and a mercurial Grace Gummer as Duntsch’s former physician’s assistant, take over in the second half of the story, each actor once again finding a way to fully embody an underwritten part."
• Dr. Death has some sharp observations to make about large institutions and their administrations: "Duntsch’s betrayal of medical ethics, his lethal forays into malpractice, did not go unnoticed—there were colleagues prepared to take any measures necessary to bring the dangers Duntsch posed to the attention of the administration," says Dorothy Rabinowitz. "Here were neurosurgeon Robert Henderson—an impressively strong performance by Alec Baldwin—and vascular surgeon Randall Kirby (Christian Slater) who issued the first warnings about Duntsch to the hospital administrators. They were met, not surprisingly, by resistance to bad news of this sort not uncommon in such situations—especially when that news is about someone reputed to be a great star, and one they’re happy to have landed. Which was precisely the attitude Drs. Henderson and Kirby faced according to this series: Duntsch’s new employers did not look gratefully on anyone bringing news that their new acquisition was a menace with a couple of patient deaths to his credit. (In the end, the real life Duntsch would lose his medical license, be prosecuted, and eventually sentenced to life in prison.) The most striking aspect of this story, perhaps, is the current of plausibility that runs through it all, that says this is what can happen, this is what did happen to the victims of someone revered as an authority, like Duntsch."
• Dr. Death manages to improve on its source material: "Peacock’s Dr. Death is the latest of a surprisingly rare breed: a scripted TV series adapted from a popular true-crime podcast. Between the lurid subject matter, meticulous reportage, and preexisting narrative structures, the genre pleads to be transformed into prestige-adjacent eight-episode runs," says Joshua Alston. "But to be fair, doing so is risky business. A tin-eared performance or miscalculated tone is all it takes to evoke the most mercenary of Lifetime’s ripped-from-the-headlines factory farm. Riskier still, if a work of narrative non-fiction is impressive enough to warrant an adaptation, it may not gain anything from the effort. Such was the case with Dirty John, USA’s scripted spin on the Wondery podcast about a mild-mannered interior design mogul and her hasty, horrific relationship with a malignant romance scammer. Dirty John was, at its very best, a competent and respectful staging of a story that had become its best self long before Connie Britton and Eric Bana stepped into the lead roles. That history is what makes Dr. Death, the second scripted series born of a Wondery podcast, a pleasant surprise wrapped in a decidedly unpleasant story. In fact, this adaptation manages to improve on its source material, perhaps because the story of Dr. Christopher Duntsch is so monstrous, it must be seen to be believed."
• Dr. Death ends up feeling like a long sit to end up no closer to understanding a case whose details are all public: "The show so closely follows Baldwin’s line of thought — treating why Duntsch did what he did as almost irrelevant even as it documents his misdeeds — that it leaves a great deal on the table," says Daniel D'Addario. "(In this way, it suggests that the true-crime-podcast-to-limited-series pipeline that previously gave us the Dirty John franchise might tend to leave its potential insights slightly underbaked.) Parental maltreatment explains why Duntsch wanted to be a doctor, but why someone so far removed from the most basic understanding of medicine felt no guilt about leaving people forever altered, or killing them, is a question that warrants more serious consideration. Instead, we see various sides of Duntsch, splintered and prismatic but never coming together into a cohesive whole. All are compelling: The ambitious would-be superstar who wants to be a pioneer in stem-cell research; the villainous rebel who tells Baldwin’s character that there are '49 other states' in which he can practice if his Texas medical license gets pulled; the salesman that urges and begs a patient with second thoughts to 'make this happen today.' It’s in this last mode, and elsewhere in the series, that Dr. Death sidles up to an intriguing and provocative point, that the medical system in the U.S. incentivizes volume over good outcomes, and helped to create a doctor who was relentless in performing surgeries even as he cared little how they went. But this is an explanation that only glimmers in moments, then falls away. Duntsch never adds up to a character we can understand, and standing back and wondering just how far beyond our understanding some people can be doesn’t fly as the takeaway for eight hours’ worth of entertainment."
• Dr. Death showrunner Patrick Macmanus explains the differences between the show and podcast: One significant person from the podcast isn't mentioned at all on the show, while there are several composites on the Peacock series. Dr. Death also invented a scene so that Alec Baldwin and Joshua Jackson could be on screen together. “We take a dive into Henderson’s subconscious and his conscience during that episode, which allows us to bring Henderson and Duntsch together in a way that never happened,” says Macmanus. “So while it is a diversion from the rest of the feel of the series, it was a very purposeful diversion. And I think it’s an interesting turn that enables Henderson and Duntsch to go toe-to-toe for a little bit.”
• Joshua Jackson on preparing to play a monstrous character based on a real person: "Well, I think in some ways it makes it easier, because there are boundaries and parameters that are laid down by the documentary evidence of this person’s life," says Jackson. "And those limitations can actually be liberating in that you don’t have to start from a completely blank slate. Across the board, everybody certainly felt the weight of honoring the story, of telling the worst moments of people’s lives without being exploitative. And that is undoubtedly the psychological burden of playing these scenes from Duntsch’s perspective. It’s just hard…. It’s hard to not feel guilt for the effect of his actions in the world. And particularly, as we got into the latter stages of filming Duntsch at his absolute worst as a sociopathic narcissist, playing those scenes where you are just completely disconnected from the effect that he had was not a pleasant psychological space to live in for six months."
• Jackson on Christopher Duntsch: “He has all of the book knowledge and he is actually a very, very, very intelligent man. So, he’s capable of deluding himself and fooling other people,” says Jackson. “When you look at his surgical attack — what he said he wanted to do — it’s exactly perfect. He knew exactly where he wanted to be, how he wanted to do it, what he wanted the practice and the outcome to be. It’s just that when he got to the practical application because he hadn’t done that work — he’d been allowed to escape doing that work — he didn’t have the actual skills to apply that. Now, most every other human being would have one disastrous outcome, maybe two, and go, ‘Oh shit I don’t know what I’m doing here, I should stop doing this.’ But this is where that narcissistic personality that frankly you have to have to be a surgeon (comes in).”
• Jackson was adamant that he not judge Duntsch: "When I listened to the podcast, when I got into the conversation with Patrick Macmanus, when he gave me all the research material, I so wanted to make him evil," says Jackson. "My instinct was that the only way, that this man has to be evil, because there has to be a reason why all of this spectacularly bad stuff happened and the simplest and easiest answers he's evil. Right? He's a psychopath. He's doing it on purpose. I wanted to make it easy for myself. And that's frankly what I found so compelling about the character is that it's not easy. He thinks he's the hero of this story. Right? So the outcomes are totally evil, and it is unconscionable that this man was allowed to continue to create this much chaos and pain in people's lives. But from the inside, he sees himself as the victim of circumstance. And that disconnect from reality, I found really compelling."