Anna Pou: Last News

Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans in the late summer of 2005.The eight-episode series, premiering Aug. 12 on Apple TV+, is based on Sheri Fink’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name chronicling the hellish five-day timespan at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans as Katrina ravaged the city, breached levees, submerged most of the area underwater and forced the hospital and LifeCare — a private health facility on the 7th floor — to evacuate its patients with deadly results that no one could have foreseen … or, perhaps, even avoided.The series opens on Sept. 11, 2005, 13 days after Katrina first made landfall, when 45 bodies were discovered in the abandoned hospital’s chapel, with no explanation of what happened to them or how they got there.

Five Days at Memorial, the grim tale about the disastrous events that took place at a New Orleans hospital after Hurricane Katrina, finished its eight-episode run today on Apple TV. Here, Executive Producer Carlton Cuse (Locke & Key, Lost), who together with John Ridley (12 Years a Slave) adapted the series from the nonfiction book by Sheri Fink, explains what it was like to chronicle the story of healthcare professionals like Dr. Anna Pou (Vera Farmiga) and incident commander Susan Mulderick (Cherry Jones), who faced overwhelming odds to save patients at Memorial Medical Center.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticThe aftermath of Hurricane Katrina so precisely crystallized a set of seemingly unfixable problems with this country that it’s surprising TV, in an era of re-examining recent history, is only now getting around to depicting it in fictionalized form. It’s not for lack of trying: Ryan Murphy had previously proposed multiple takes on the story, one with Annette Bening starring as Louisiana Gov.

“There is nothing else to do for them except to them make them comfortable.” So says Vera Farmiga’s Dr. Anna Pou in the first trailer for Apple TV’s Hurricane Katrina drama Five Days At Memorial.

Vera Farmiga is heading back to television in a new limited series for Apple.