# Five Days at Memorial (2022)

> Exhausted caregivers at a flooded New Orleans hospital face agonizing life and death choices when power and rescue fail.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/90724

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 8
- Episode runtime: 47 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: drama, history
- Created by: Carlton Cuse, John Ridley
- Network: Apple TV
- Cast: Vera Farmiga, Cherry Jones, Cornelius Smith, Jr., Robert Pine, Adepero Oduye, Julie Ann Emery, Michael Gaston, Molly Hager
- TMDB rating: 7.7/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3283594/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: layered
- Violence: none
- Tone: harrowing, somber, tense, morally weighty, restrained

## What critics say

Audience reception is positive, with viewers praising the restraint and emotional weight of a harrowing true-events hospital drama.

## Synopsis

Five Days at Memorial (2022) is an American true-events medical miniseries created by Carlton Cuse and John Ridley for Apple TV. Drawn from a novel and grounded in a real disaster, it follows Dr. Anna Pou (Vera Farmiga) and a staff of exhausted caregivers, including Susan Mulderick (Cherry Jones) and Dr. Bryant King (Cornelius Smith, Jr.), inside a New Orleans hospital after floodwaters rise, power fails and temperatures climb. The engine of the story is the slow, unbearable accumulation of hard choices: who can be evacuated, who must be left behind, and what medical staff can justify when rescue never arrives. Each episode builds pressure through rationed supplies, stifling heat, failing equipment and frightened families pressing for answers. Shaped as an eight-episode limited series, it stays with one building and one crisis across its run rather than jumping between cases. The tone is sober, harrowing and morally weighty, with a reflective, restrained craft that avoids melodrama. Viewers who appreciated the true-events rigor of Chernobyl, the crisis-room tension of Contagion or the clinical intensity of ER will find resonance here. Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, it is a devastating look at institutional failure under disaster conditions.

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