Helen Archer | On 08, Oct 2024

If you weren’t aware of the subject matter of Dr Death – a clue to which is contained in the title – you would, for the first few episodes of its second season, be forgiven for thinking this is a true crime dramatisation in the manner of Dirty John. So much time is given to the romance between Dr Paulo Macchiarini (Edgar Ramirez) and his erstwhile paramour, TV journalist Benita Alexander (Mandy Moore), that the medical scandal for which he became infamous seems like something of an afterthought.

And if Macchiarini’s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard the Dr Death podcast on which this series was based, or read the Vanity Fair article, or viewed the BBC Storyville episode – or the more recent Netflix series Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife. This eight-part dramatisation, directed by Jennifer Morrison and Laura Belsey, also comes with an accompanying documentary. Macchiarini was a venerated thoracic surgeon who specialised in regenerative medicine research. This research involved replacing damaged windpipes with plastic ones, seeded with the stem cells of his patients. While initially these surgeries seemed successful, over time the devices would be rejected by the body, and six of the seven patients who had the procedure died long and painful deaths.

But in this dramatisation, much of this plays second fiddle to Macchiarini’s romance with Benita, whom he met while being the subject of a documentary she was working on, about performing the surgery on 2-year-old Hannah Warren in Illinois. Swept away by his charming bedside manner, and impressed by his worldly, cosmopolitan demeanour – as well as the apparent “miracles” he was performing – they began an affair, hidden from workmates because of the unspoken journalistic rule of never getting entangled with your sources. This “love story” makes up much of the first four episodes, intercut with flashbacks to some of his previous surgeries as the renowned Karolinska Institute in Sweden, where some colleagues – notably fictional character Dr Luke Gamelli, played by Luke Kirby – are starting to have their suspicions.

Were it not for the much-needed fifth episode, which is told entirely from the perspective of one of his patients, Yesim Cetir (Alisha Erozer), the viewer might find it hard to understand the severity of the stress the body is put through after the fake trachea is implanted. Dr Gamelli is charged with Yesim’s aftercare, performing more than 160 operations over the course of a year in a doomed bid to keep her alive. After this episode, more time is given to the whistleblowers at the Karolinska Institute, as Drs Ana Lasbrey (Ashley Madekwe) and Anders Svensson (Gustaf Hammarsten) team up with Gamelli to shut down Macchiarani’s procedures, while their boss Nils Headley (a villainous Jack Davenport) pushes back in an attempt to protect the reputation of the Institute.

But the series keeps returning to the Hallmark-esque plot of Benita uncovering more about her “love rat” boyfriend, doing a disservice to what should be the main plot. It is not helped by the fact that – as in the first season – the psyche of Macchiarini is never interrogated. Though the script several times refers to his “God complex”, that is all we get in terms of his possible motivations. His personal history, meanwhile, is relegated to a glimpse at his family home in Barcelona, where he appears to have a young family, and a trip to his adoring mother’s house in Italy, where a photograph of her son with the Pope – one of many big names he claimed were his private patients – takes pride of place. Nor is it helped by the one-note performances of its leads, which reveal nothing other than flattened affect on the part of the doctor, and a kind of manic affront at being betrayed on the part of Benita. Both end up as cyphers onto which the viewer’s anxieties are projected, rather than the more rounded characters they might have been with a different script.

That being said, the season does hold one’s attention, gaining momentum as the whistleblowers come together to reveal the truth. But if you are hoping for and answers as to how Macchiarini could have got away with so much for so long – or, indeed, how he could have continued implanting the fake trachea knowing the suffering he was causing – you will be disappointed.

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