General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Five Days at Memorial (2022 TV series)

Five Days at Memorial is an American limited drama series that premiered on Apple TV+ on August 12, 2022, dramatizing the ordeal of staff and patients at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans during the five days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005¹^•². It was created by John Ridley and Carlton Cuse and adapted from Sheri Fink's 2013 nonfiction book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, itself an expansion of her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2009 investigation in The New York Times Magazine¹^•².

Key fact	Detail
Format	Eight-episode limited series on Apple TV+, rated TV-MA; premiered August 12, 2022¹
Creators	John Ridley (Academy Award winner for 12 Years a Slave) and Carlton Cuse (Emmy winner for Lost), showrunners, writers, and executive producers; Ridley also directed³
Source	Sheri Fink's 2013 book, an expansion of her Pulitzer-winning 2009 New York Times Magazine article; Fink served as a producer²^•³
Lead cast	Vera Farmiga as Dr. Anna Pou, Cherry Jones as incident commander Susan Mulderick, with Cornelius Smith Jr., Adepero Oduye, Julie Ann Emery, and Robert Pine⁴^•⁵
Structure	The first five episodes cover one day each; the final three follow the investigation into the 45 deaths at the hospital⁶
Reception	Metascore 74 (generally favorable); 85% Rotten Tomatoes critic rating; 7.7/10 on IMDb; one Primetime Emmy win⁷^•⁴

Spoilers

Subject matter

The series reconstructs events at Memorial Medical Center, a hospital built below sea level in the New Orleans basin, after Hurricane Katrina broke the levees, flooding the city and cutting the hospital off from electricity and outside aid⁸. Roughly 600 staff and more than 200 patients, along with their loved ones, were stranded at the hospital during and immediately after the storm⁹. With no power, dwindling fresh water, dying batteries, and sweltering heat, staff triaged rescue efforts and placed the most severely ill patients last for evacuation⁸^•¹⁰.

The central ethical crisis concerns the injections given to critically ill patients. According to Fink's book, a triage process led to the controversial decision to inject critically ill patients with fatal doses of morphine to refocus attention on those with a chance of surviving; 45 bodies were recovered from the hospital, nine of which were deemed suspected victims of euthanasia¹¹. In the series, the morphine is administered by Dr. Anna Pou, played by Vera Farmiga⁵. Dr. Anna Pou and nurses Lori Budo and Cheri Landry were charged with murder; a grand jury declined to indict Pou, while charges against the nurses were dropped after they agreed to testify before the grand jury¹¹^•¹⁷.

Structure and episodes

The eight episodes divide into two movements. The first five episodes play out with one day per episode, tracing the deteriorating conditions as increasingly impossible decisions had to be made; the final three episodes shift to the aftermath, following investigators seeking to establish what happened and who was responsible for the 45 deaths⁶. The narrative is interspersed with archival news footage⁵. The finale is titled "The Reckoning"¹⁶.

The series also depicts the institutional failures surrounding the hospital: it had no plans for mass evacuation in the event of flooding, and it was overseen by a remote, profit-motivated company; executives off site ordered the medical staff to abandon high-risk patients⁵^•¹².

Production and development

Apple announced the project on September 1, 2020, as a limited series from Ridley and Cuse, both serving as showrunners, writers, and executive producers, with Ridley directing and ABC Signature producing; Fink served as a producer³. Cuse said development began in 2019, and that working through the COVID-19 pandemic added resonance to the story of a hospital crisis¹². The adaptation rights had a longer history: the project had previously gone to producer Scott Rudin and then to Ryan Murphy as part of FX's American Crime Story series before Ridley and Cuse convinced Fink they should tell her story¹³.

Fink's reporting rested on more than 500 interviews conducted during a six-year investigation, and the production design team had access to photographs of the hospital in the aftermath of Katrina¹⁴^•². The real people the characters were based on were not directly involved in the production; Farmiga said Fink's book "was our Bible" for the cast¹⁵.

Reception

Critical response was largely favorable. The season holds a Metascore of 74 on Metacritic, with 15 of 19 critic reviews positive and none negative⁷, and an 85% Rotten Tomatoes critic rating¹⁶. Reviewers singled out the ensemble: The New Yorker called the series "excellent" and praised Cherry Jones, Vera Farmiga, Adepero Oduye, and Julie Ann Emery for "truly masterly performances"⁸. The San Francisco Chronicle described it as "harrowing, infuriating yet remarkably even-handed"¹⁶. Critics were more divided on the final three episodes: RogerEbert.com found the investigation section less effective, tending toward melodrama as it tried to cover too much in three episodes with new central characters⁶, and The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the closing episodes did not offer a reckoning of their own despite the finale's title¹⁶. Sight and Sound judged that themes of race, religion, and money were treated cursorily and that the question of Pou's guilt was largely fudged⁵.

On IMDb the series holds a 7.7/10 rating from about 17,000 users, and it won one Primetime Emmy Award with four wins and two nominations overall⁴.

Historical context

The series ends not with the hospital but with a fact about the city itself: by 2018, $14 billion had gone into a system of levees and floodwalls built to shield New Orleans against future floods, which the review observed could require updating as soon as 2023 given rising sea levels.⁵ Hurricane Katrina caused about 1,800 deaths and over $120 billion in damage in New Orleans⁵.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026