Five Days At Memorial

Showrunners Carlton Cuse (“Lost,” the “Jack Ryan” TV series ) and John Ridley (Oscar-winning writer of “12 Years a Slave” and creator of the series “American Crime”) have crafted a thought-provoking series with traditional plot and framing devices that lay out events in clear fashion, with the ensemble cast—led by Vera Farmiga in one of her finest roles—turning in resonant work.

I do not recommend binging it for anyone’s emotional stability—even those first three could be rough in one sitting—but this is rewarding dramatic television, the kind of show that takes history from the page and brings it to life, honoring both the dead and the people traumatized by Mother Nature and bureaucratic incompetence.

This eight-episode series is a gripping affair, an engrossing medical thriller that doubles as a powerful indictment of government and corporate inaction and outright neglect.

Five Days at Memorial is a high-quality, extremely grim retelling of a low point in American history. This is not a series that anyone is going to enjoy watching, for what I hope are obvious reasons. But it's a show that absolutely should be watched.

Five Days at Memorial is an important but extremely frustrating watch, I suspect by design. ... Five Days at Memorial urges you to put yourself in the shoes of the survivors and victims. And it demands that we examine the systems that are meant to serve us in a crisis so that something like this never happens again.

It is utterly brutal and utterly compelling. This is at a slight cost to character delineation and development. Every performance (especially Vera Farmiga as Dr Anna Pou, Julie Ann Emery as nurse Diane Robichaux and Raven Dauda as the daughter eventually forced to abandon her dying mother) is quietly brilliant, but their situations are so unrelentingly terrible that they inevitably become slightly emblematic rather than individualised figures.

Working backward from the 45 dead bodies discovered in Memorial Hospital, it's a compelling fact-based look at those five days as well as their aftermath.

While often gripping, the series, covering a nearly two-year time span, is not the propulsive “ER”-style experience promised by the trailer. The first five episodes, broken down neatly by Day One, Day Two etc., constitute a stark drama of waiting. ... Later episodes of “Five Days at Memorial” favor spooky, vaguely Expressionistic flashbacks where we learn what really went down. They’re a bit much.

There’s a way that highlighting valor can often be used to paper over severe shortcomings in a time of crisis. This series, though inelegant at times, avoids that trap by embracing the messiness required to put those choices and mistakes into perspective. Though “Five Days at Memorial” certainly doesn’t shy away from the grimness of a hospital slowly losing its resources and being effectively cut off from the outside world, its strongest insights are into the idea of institutional collapse.

Five Days at Memorial isn't a hopeful show by any means, but it is one that strives to use tragedy to tell a more complex, existential story about everyday human beings who are pushed to their physical and moral limits.

The show leaves it up to the viewer to decide. Who’s guilty and of what — murder? being human? — isn’t so much left ambiguous as attributed to the mystery of how our different minds work. That’s not conventionally satisfying when widespread government, corporate and individual mishandling led to so much death and destruction. But it may be the most honest answer to why people do what they do when the levee breaks.

“Five Days at Memorial” is not an easy watch. ... If you can stomach its unadulterated despair, it’s also a powerfully told story that’s impossible to forget.

The series is well-made and often hard to watch.. ... Spread out over a longer time, the final three episodes, in which investigators Arthur “Butch” Schafer (Michael Gaston) and Virginia Rider (Molly Hager) build a case against Pou and two nurses, are less compelling.

There’s a lean drama miniseries in here mixed with a disaster film, a superfluous love story, and a police investigation. But high-highs and low-lows make it come across confused when it should feel necessary. Five Days at Memorial is an important story that deserved better.

The CGI boffins are on point in recreating the moment the levees broke. Archive footage does the rest. As for inside the hospital, the narrative tends to move along generic tramlines.

Cuse and Ridley take a more measured approach, telling a story that feels strangely muted even as it addresses a catastrophe. ... The series ends up coming in for a soft landing after early episodes riveted with emotional and visceral power.

Ms. Farmiga is always good, but several of the cast, given banal and obvious things to say, can be as wearying as the deluge of emergencies beleaguering the hospital, not all of them caused by the hurricane itself. ... What's genuinely impressive—and even instructive—are the computer-generated visuals.