# Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife (2023)

> A three-part Netflix documentary chronicling how celebrated surgeon Paolo Macchiarini's stem cell windpipe transplants left his patients dying.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/155693

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 3
- Episode runtime: 53 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: crime, documentary
- Network: Netflix
- Cast: Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, Benita Alexander
- TMDB rating: 7.2/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28197236/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: accessible
- Violence: mild
- Tone: sober, investigative, unsparing, tense, melancholic

## Synopsis

Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife (2023) is a British true crime documentary limited series created for Netflix. Across three episodes of roughly 53 minutes each, it follows Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, a world famous surgeon whose celebrated stem cell infused windpipe transplants repeatedly ended with his patients dying. The series builds its case through archive footage of the surgeon himself and on-camera recollections from journalist and former fiancée Benita Alexander, who speaks as herself and reflects on the whirlwind romance and the jet-setting image that surrounded him. Rather than a single crime, each episode traces how a dazzling public reputation kept the experiments going while the human cost piled up, examining the gap between polished credentials and the patients who trusted them. The atmosphere is sober and investigative, with a steady, unsparing tone that lets testimony and footage carry the weight. Viewers drawn to medical scandal documentaries, charismatic fraud stories, and true crime docuseries in the vein of The Dropout and Tiger King will find the same appetite for institutional accountability and the uncomfortable question of how a fraud stays celebrated for so long.

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