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In my day, the only Dr Death we knew was Jack Kevorkian, the man who helped the pioneers of physician-assisted suicide (not to be confused with Erroll Morris’ documentary on Mr. Death, the Holocaust denier who designed execution devices). As such, in fact, I didn’t know anything about Christopher Duntsch (Joshua Jackson, RIP), also known as Dr. Death due to the trail of deaths and injuries that the spine surgeon left behind at the Texas in the 2010s.
Peacock’s new series Dr Mort explores the losses Duntsch left behind. He also studies how something like this could have happened, how the medical profession seems to be designed to protect incompetence, and how easy it was for a true quack like Duntsch to continue performing surgeries despite the extraordinary number of medical malpractice. It also follows Duntsch’s personal relationships – he had an affair with his doctor’s assistant (Grace Gummer) while his stripper girlfriend is pregnant with his baby – and the smarmy charm (and god complex). that allowed him to go as far as he did.
Meanwhile, two other neurosurgeons – Robert Henderson (Alec Baldwin) and Randall Kirby (Christian Slater) – have made it their personal mission not only to ensure that Duntsch never practices medicine again, but also to put him in prison. for murder. The level of incompetence is staggering – Duntsch doesn’t even seem to be familiar with the basics of neurosurgery – and part of what the series explores is whether Duntsch is only incompetent or if he is also a sociopath who voluntarily botches surgeries. This investigation takes us back to his days in college football, where he lacked the ability to properly read a playbook, and to his days in medical school, where he appeared to be a star student despite a lack of communication skills. operating room.
Henderson and Kirby end up setting up the authorities (here represented by the assistant of the American attorney AnnaSophia Robb) to help them neutralize Duntsch, even as he continues to move from one hospital to another without meeting any problems obtaining surgical privileges despite everyone – patients, nurses, doctors and teachers – familiar with their work.
The premise of Dr Mort reads like your standard real crime series, but there is a trashy addictive quality to this one, much like the two seasons of Dirty Jean aired on Bravo / Netflix. The writing is a bit thin, but there is nothing that cannot be covered up by the engaged performances of Jackson, Baldwin and Slater’s TV films, which fill up. Kuffs in it, in addition to the solid support cast. This includes Kelsey Grammer, who plays Duntsch’s medical school teacher and mentor, and Dominic Burgess, who plays Duntsch’s best friend, who has enough mistaken faith in Duntsch to allow him to operate on him. He eventually becomes quadriplegic.
Ultimately, Dr Mort is as entertaining as it is infuriating, although anyone with a history of dealing with inadequate healthcare professionals may find it triggering (the trigger is also the sound surgical hammers make when they hit the spine). There’s certainly a lifelong movie quality to it, but not necessarily in a bad way: it takes some skill to do something so trashy without downplaying the threat from Duntsch and medics like him; in fact, it’s all the more maddening because it’s so watchable. I found myself clenching my fist at the injustice of it all more than once, but I couldn’t look away either.
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Source of header image: Peacock TV
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