How The ‘Dr Death’ TV Adaptation Rides The New Wave Of True Crime
We’ll probably never know why Christopher Duntsch did what he did, so further fictionalising his story kind of misses the point.
It’s a story so devastating and gruesome, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a work of fictional horror: a neurosurgeon entrusted with the wellbeing of strangers and friends turns the operating theatre into a crime scene, maiming almost all — and killing two — of the 38 patients he treated over two short years.
Content warning: This article discusses serious incidences of violence and medical negligence, and also contains spoilers for Dr Death.
But it’s the very real story behind Dr Death, a fictionalised eight-part TV adaptation of the chart-topping Wondery podcast of the same name. It stars Joshua Jackson as Christopher Duntsch, the former neurosurgeon sentenced to life imprisonment for paralysing a former patient (though he’s accused of seriously and permanently injuring more than 30 others), along with Alex Baldwin and Christian Slater as the surgeons credited with finally stopping him.
The podcast and TV adaptation come at the beginning of a new era of true crime — one that sees creators look beyond the surface-level shock value and voyeurism that gave us the likes of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. In recent years, series like Mindhunter — despite having some of the most shocking source material at their fingertips — have begun to dig into the systemic failings that see innocent people injured or killed.
Understanding Christopher Duntsch
In the case of Dr Death, whether Duntsch’s crimes were the result of murderous tendencies, sociopathy, or appalling incompetence isn’t really the point. Rather, investigative journalist and Dr Death podcast host Laura Beil attempted to unravel the systemic failings of the US education and medical systems that allowed him to begin and continue operating.
The fact is, we’ll probably never know why Duntsch did what he did, so further fictionalising his story kind of misses the point.
This new TV series takes much the same approach, albeit with more of the Hollywood pizzazz you’d expect from a production of this magnitude, focusing as much on the “too-hard basket” approach of medical institutions and individual suffering as Duntsch himself, and resisting the urge to speculate about his motivations. The fact is, we’ll probably never know why Duntsch did what he did, so further fictionalising his story kind of misses the point.
But that’s not to say Joshua Jackson’s portrayal of the narcissistic neurosurgeon isn’t compelling — it’s the charm and charisma he radiated as a teenaged Pacey Witter that makes it so easy to believe powerful people and institutions were duped by Duntsch for years. When we first meet him in the TV series, he’s explaining how the death of a former patient was actually a result of an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic used in their procedure – and is therefore the fault of the anaesthetist, not a product of his incompetence or more sinister motives.
The Crime Of The American System
Ultimately, though, it was the opaqueness of the US medical establishment that made it nigh-on impossible for his peers to speak up about his wrongdoing, protecting and enabling Duntsch for years. At one point, after indulging Kirby’s (Slater) speculation about whether Duntsch was “doing it on purpose, or…he just sucks”, Henderson (Baldwin) retorts: “The question isn’t why he did it, it’s how he got away with it”.
And, in the series, as in real life, the educational system is equally culpable. Listeners of the podcast will remember Duntsch never actually performed the typical 1000-plus surgeries required to complete a residency — in fact, he clocked up less than 100, but yet was allowed to graduate, going on to destroy almost 40 lives. Later in the series, Duntsch’s legal team is shown suggesting to a witness that he only graduated medical school because his superiors liked him, not because he was a gifted surgeon.
True crime is beginning to evolve beyond entertainment defined by shock value and virality, trading gratuitous gore for empathetic storytelling.
The series prefers to labour these points than indulge a voyeuristic fascination with the man or his actions. In fact, it’s the stuff you don’t see — like the way Duntsch hammering a mallet into a patient’s spine is timed to the tick of a clock — that has the greatest impact. True crime is beginning to evolve beyond entertainment defined by shock value and virality, trading gratuitous gore for empathetic storytelling.
And it seems everyone involved in the TV production was aware of the project’s intention.
“If Christopher Duntsch would have been kicked out after the first surgery and never practiced again, it would have certainly been a tragedy for that individual, but you would look at the system and go, OK, that makes sense. He was able to sneak through. That was terrible but they stopped him. They got him, because we matter more,’” Jackson told the Daily News.
“Instead, what the story actually tells us is that the profit motive stands above patient outcome. The system protects itself over and above its own patients, and that’s terrifying.”
Perhaps viewers who haven’t yet consumed Beil’s masterful investigation will experience the TV adaptation differently, given only so much minutiae can be crammed into an eight-part mini-series, but respect for her masterful exposé is there at every turn, using Duntsch as a repulsive vehicle for criticism of the systemic failings that put vulnerable lives in danger every day.