Critic Reviews

Ridley and Cuse have taken Fink's investigation into those fateful days at Memorial and turned it into a spellbinding visual narrative — easily the best limited series of the year so far.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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 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.