You can always trust a doctor, can't you?
Peacock's Dr. Death Is Based on A Chilling True Crime Podcast About a Murderous Surgeon. Here's What to Know
he nightmare at the center of Dr. Death, a new Peacock drama inspired by the 2018 true crime podcast of the same name from Wondery, involves a surgeon who seems intent on using his scalpel to destroy the lives of his patients—and a medical system content to let him skate by. Out July 15, Dr. Death introduces viewers to Christopher Duntsch, a real-life Texas-based surgeon who in 2017 was sentenced to life in prison after maiming and even killing almost all of the nearly 40 patients he operated on between 2011 and 2013.
The series, a lightly fictionalized version of the podcast, stars Joshua Jackson as the slick and overconfident Duntsch. Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater join the cast as two doctors who try to stop Duntsch from causing further harm. Their efforts to stop him, as documented both in the podcast and show, take a long time, as Duntsch moves between hospitals and continues injuring patients.
How does a doctor get away with something like this? Of the 37 patients Duntsch operated on in Dallas over about two years, 33 were hurt or harmed in the process. Some people woke up paralyzed; others emerged from anesthesia to permanent pain from nerve damage. Two patients died, one from significant blood loss after the operation and the other from a stroke caused by a cut vertebral artery. One patient, a childhood friend of Duntsch’s, went in for a spinal operation with someone he trusted and woke up a quadriplegic after the doctor damaged his vertebral artery. Such significant injuries should have been “never events”—something that should never occur in an operating room, a surgeon told D Magazine, which covers the Dallas-Fort Worth area, in a 2016 piece that inspired the eventual Dr. Death podcast.
The question of how Duntsch was able to operate with impunity for so long—when surrounded by many people who tried to raise the alarm and failed—drives Dr. Death, which jumps across time in each episode to show what the doctor was like as a young man, friend and medical student, and then later as a surgeon, a partner and a father. One conversation in Peacock’s first episode of Dr. Death sums up the confusion many felt at watching Duntsch work: “It was like he knew what he was supposed to do … and he did the exact opposite.”
Here’s what to know about Duntsch, what he did and how he was eventually stopped.
Confident to a fault
Joshua Jackson in 'Dr. Death'
Joshua Jackson in 'Dr. Death' Barbara Nitke—Peacock
Duntsch took careful steps to put across the image of a hardworking, competent and caring person and doctor. The son of a physical therapist and teacher, he was known even before pursuing his medical aspirations as a person who didn’t give up—even when letting go would have been the right choice. Determined to play football for a Division I college team, Duntsch dedicated himself to training while in high school. While he did make it on to a couple of college teams—one in Mississippi and one in Colorado—former teammates said he had trouble keeping up in practice but would plead with coaches to let him keep trying. “I gathered very quickly that everything that he had accomplished in sports had come with the sweat equity,” one old teammate told ProPublica in 2018. “When people said, ‘You weren’t going to be good enough,’ he outworked that and he made it happen.”