Although in just a few hours, American Crime Story: Impeachment will hit the small screen, featuring Beanie Feldstein, Sarah Paulson, and John Travolta – to name a few of the show’s stars – recounting the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the drama’s third season almost centered around an entirely different story of American crime – a series of alleged euthanasias that occurred at a New Orleans hospital in the days following Hurricane Katrina.
Featuring a harrowing glimpse at one of the catastrophic hurricane’s lesser-known tragedies, American Crime Story: Katrina had all the ingredients to distinguish itself as the series’s most thought-provoking and gut-wrenching installment.
Starring Paulson as Dr. Anna Pou, a cancer surgeon who was on duty amid the storm and later was accused along with two nurses of administering a deadly concoction of sedatives and painkillers to some of the hospital’s sickest patients, the show would have been based the book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by ProPublica reporter, Sherri Fink.
“I’m confident it will air,” John Landgraf, CEO of FX Networks said of the series and its complicated production history back in 2017. Although the installment was originally set to cover a broader swath of the hurricane’s destruction, Landgraf said that the season’s new direction as a medical thriller was a “great idea for a pivot,” and that the series was “in really good shape.”
Despite this confidence and Executive Producer, Ryan Murphy’s strong track record of tackling particularly grandiose tales – after all, he was the creative genius behind Glee, a network television series that notably featured a riot over tater tots, several complex musical numbers, and the now-infamous wheelchair-only rendition of “Proud Mary” – it seems American Crime Story: Katrina posed several unique challenges, some that proved insurmountable.
“Doctors who started out trying to save lives, ended up euthanizing patients,” Brad Simpson, an executive on the series told The Hollywood Reporter of the undertaking. “It tracks everything that happened in Katrina. There’s people of different classes and races, all in that hospital. There are people that feel like they’ve been abandoned by their government, and there are people who are making decisions about triage—who lives and who dies—that outside of that bubble look horrific.”
Likely requiring the show’s team to recreate a flooded, powerless hospital turned-makeshift morgue, depict several emergency helicopter evacuations, and wrangle an entire “Noah’s Ark of pets”, as Fink dubbed it in her book, all while tactfully discussing several purported euthanasias knowing the families of the deceased may be tuning in at home, the story’s massive scale ultimately proved to be too big.
“We tried developing that. It was just too vast and expensive,” Murphy told Collider of the season’s fate back in April 2020. “I ultimately just couldn’t figure out how to crack it to be honest,” he continued. “We have many, many, many different Crime Stories in the works, but it’s a very hard show. It always takes two years to write. And we never do it, we never move forward unless we’re absolutely sure that the scripts are great,” the prolific television producer added.
While this harrowing tale of death amid Hurricane Katrina will ultimately find its way to the small screen in an upcoming mini-series for Apple TV+ entitled Five Days at Memorial, which is set to wrap filming later this month according to Variety, the story at hand is not only one of American crime, but of realized worse-case scenarios, a terrifying thought experiment come to life.
What Happened At Memorial Medical Center?
When Hurricane Katrina first made landfall in New Orleans, Louisiana on Monday, August 29, 2005, Memorial Medical Center had found itself a makeshift shelter yet again, hospital staffers toting “their families and pets, as well as coolers packed with muffulettas,” to hunker down in the confines of its brick structure, Fink detailed in her Pulitzer-winning New York Times article, “The Deadly Choices at Memorial.” Housing roughly 2,000 people, 200 of which were patients and 600 of which were staffers, by the time the storm began to make landfall, the hospital’s slumber-party-esque energy quickly shifted to pure terror and confusion as the building shook, trembling from Katrina’s approximately 100 mile-per-hour winds. Staffers covered the inside of windows – some of which still broke from the force of the storm – with plywood and relocated patients who could be moved into hallways. Still, the building’s basement began to take on water.