The latest Wondery podcast to transition to the small screen is Dr. Death, based on the first season of journalist Laura Beil’s series on deadly doctors and the systems that enable them. Like Dirty John on sister network Bravo, it looks like Peacock’s Dr. Death kicks the melodrama up a few or 20 notches, as evidenced by this very dramatic trailer:
To be fair, Joshua Jackson seems to be giving the sort of on-the-nose performance you’d expect from a series called—pause for impact—DR. DEATH. Co-starring Alec Baldwin, Kelsey Grammer (yeah it’s that kind of party), Christian Slater (whose previous role in Dirty John makes him something of a Wondery day player), and AnnaSophia Robb, the limited series tells the true story of a spinal surgeon with questionable expertise who commits a series of deadly fuck-ups, maybe—as implied by the trailer—on purpose:
Based on Wondery’s hit podcast, DR. DEATH is inspired by the terrifying true story of Dr. Christopher Duntsch (Joshua Jackson), a rising star in the Dallas medical community. Young, charismatic and ostensibly brilliant, Dr. Duntsch was building a flourishing neurosurgery practice when everything suddenly changed. Patients entered his operating room for complex but routine spinal surgeries and left permanently maimed or dead. As victims piled up, two fellow physicians, neurosurgeon Robert Henderson (Alec Baldwin) and vascular surgeon Randall Kirby (Christian Slater), as well as Dallas prosecutor Michelle Shughart (AnnaSophia Robb), set out to stop him. DR. DEATH explores the twisted mind of Dr. Duntsch and the failures of the system designed to protect the most defenseless among us.
Dr. Death arrives on Peacock sometime this summer.