The horrible reality of our lives is that there is so much mediocre TV that looks good and good TV that looks really good, that really great TV can slip under the streamer’s radar without leaving a trace. We are here to warn precisely about cases like these for the benefit of the public. And the case of “Five Days in Memorial”, which came to an end this week on Apple TV+, is exactly such a case. The quality of the series offered by Apple’s streaming service continues to impress, the investment in them is evident, but because it is neither Netflix nor Disney (and because it is currently only about 6 percent of the American streaming market), the buzz around them does not reach high intensities in most cases. It so happens that such an impressive television work can happen almost without being referred to.
“Five Days at the Memorial” is based on Sherry Fink’s best-selling book, which itself is based on a huge article that Fink published in the “New York Times Magazine” in 2009 in which she documented five days inside a hospital in New Orleans, right after Hurricane Katrina, when thousands of people were trapped at home The flooded and disconnected patient. The series recreates for eight episodes the disaster and the human drama that took place in the hospital, skilfully combines a hospital drama and a disaster movie, and in general tears the heart with the moral questions it poses and disturbs peace more than any zombie apocalypse.
>> What we saw yesterday: a sexy series about fairies that leads the Netflix charts
>> What we saw on the weekend: all the series that passed the night for us last week
Americans don’t really like to deal with the Katrina disaster in New Orleans, which revealed to the world how close the United States is to the third world in some parts of it and showed a very fragile side of the American empire. With the exception of David Simon’s excellent “Terme” and a great many hip-hop songs, American culture has pretty much suppressed the disaster that claimed the lives of some 1,800 people. “Five Days at the Memorial” shoves it back in her face and creates quite a bit of horror in regards to the collapse of infrastructure in emergency situations. The fact that it is a kind of docu-drama and the stories of real people reinforces the human element of the story, and somehow chokes the throat and warms the heart at the same time. The series was adapted, written and directed by John Ridley (screenwriter of “12 Years a Slave”) and Carlton Cuse (“Lost”), and together with a starless cast but full of good actors put on one of the impressive productions of 2022. Don’t say we didn’t know.
>> “Five days at Memorial”, 8 episodes, now on Apple TV+