When lawyers commit fraud, they get disbarred. When journalists commit fraud, they’re publicly disgraced and shown the industry door. But when surgeons commit fraud, they can kill people. Such are the mortal stakes and ghoulish appeal of Dr. Death, the Peacock anthology series whose creators realized that there have been enough high-profile medical butchers to form the basis for a franchise.
Season 1 focused on one Christopher Duntsch (played on screen by Joshua Jackson), a Dallas-area neurosurgeon who maimed and killed with artless abandon, drinking and drugging and raging through one botched procedure after another. Season 2’s subject, by comparison, is a far cooler customer. Paolo Macchiarini was a suave, seductive thoracic surgeon and researcher who shot to prominence with his pioneering use of biosynthetic tracheas, which he claimed would save lives. Instead, he left a trail of corpses and misery. It seems Macchiarini was essentially using his patients as experiments—human lab rats to test work that was, in fact, killing actual lab rats. Meanwhile, he was also stringing along an NBC news producer, Benita Miller, who fell in love with him and helped spread his false gospel until she discovered he was as big a fraud outside the operating room as in.
It’s a nasty little story, one that was also told in the recent, salaciously titled Netflix docuseries Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife. But the dramatized version cuts deeper. It stretches out over eight episodes, allowing time for Edgar Ramírez’s Macchiarini to seduce not just Miller (played by Mandy Moore), his patients, and his colleagues, but the viewer as well. Purring out platitudes about saving lives, bragging of his (fake) friendship with the likes of Pope Francis, he’s the kind of dashing, sociopathic conman that Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley would appreciate. Except Macchiarini does his killing with a scalpel.