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.

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.

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.

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” 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 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.

There are no easy answers, and for five episodes, one per day in the title, Five Days at Memorial embraces the complexity. ... The last three episodes suggest that Ridley and Cuse aren’t quite sure what the show is as a whole.