The Peacock limited series Dr. Death is in many ways much more a horror story than a drama, but the villain at its center is all too real. Based on true events, as documented in the Wondery podcast, the series stars Joshua Jackson as Christopher Duntsch, a Texas physician who repeatedly crippled or killed patients in his care through surgeries which were either grossly incompetent or malicious. Thanks to the system, though, Duntsch was able to keep working — and hurting people — until two of his fellow doctors, Randall Kirby and Robert Henderson (played respectively by Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin), were able to expose him and put him behind bars.
In a one-on-one interview with Collider, showrunner Patrick Macmanus explained how he approached telling the story of Duntsch's rise and fall while being fully aware that explaining his motivations would never be truly possible, how important it was to examine both Duntsch the man as well as the reasons why he was able to keep working as long as he did, and how having figures like Kirby and Henderson eased the way in adapting the podcast.
Collider: So one of the aspects of this show that makes it so compelling is the fact that we want to understand why this person is who he is. For you, coming at it with the job of trying to dramatize this story, what was key to approaching that?
MACMANUS: You know, it's interesting that you asked that question because it was something that we talked about quite a bit, even before we had the writers' room — I'm talking three years ago, I think I got the podcast exactly three years ago next week — and my answer was that I genuinely don't believe we will ever be able to answer who Christopher Duntsch was and why he was, and it was not my intention, nor was it our writer's intention, once we got to the writers' room, to answer that question in full. Our intent was to present the story as best we could, and then allow audiences to take away from it whatever they would like to, because I just don't believe that we can answer why someone like Christopher Duntsch is or why he did what he did.
I can tell you that I do believe that he was a product of nature, nurture and the system that enabled him to be able to do what he did. I do believe he was born as a narcissistic sociopath. I believe that being born as a narcissistic sociopath was encouraged by his upbringing. And then I believe it absolutely became a full-blown fire when he went through school and went through the different hospitals, administrations that he went through because he wasn't stopped. And by not stopping a narcissistic sociopath, you're encouraging a narcissistic sociopath. If people come away from the show saying, "We don't know who Christopher Duntsch was," that was the intent, right? The intent of the writing was to leave it sort of an open question for audiences to draw from it as they saw.
So when it comes to the question of how he was able to get away with it for so long, that involves a lot of breaking down the administrative and legal aspects that keep a doctor like him in a position of doctoring. Were there times when you would look at drafts and be like, "Maybe we should pull back on the administrative stuff?" or were you like, "No, we should push it further, we should make this really clear?"
MACMANUS: I think that it was our intent to present the facts as we saw them in our research, and again, allow audiences to draw from them as they will. There isn't a question that there is a larger theme at work in the show, which was ultimately something that drew me to the show, which is that Christopher Duntsch doesn't just wear a black hat. It would be easy to say he is a psychopath who was doing all of this on purpose, because that's easy for us to wrap our brains around, right? But the truth was far more complex.
I don't believe that anybody in any of the administrations were actively trying to encourage this man to do what he did. I believe that it was an outgrowth of the fact that by the time these administrations caught up with what he was doing, they had already moved him on. Right? So, while I wish that the administrations acted sooner, at the end of the day, and this is something that I've said for quite a bit now, Christopher Duntsch deserves to be in jail for the rest of his life, because how he acted was completely inhuman and any human that had that ability to feel would have stopped after the first or second surgeries. They never would've made it to 38 surgeries.
How much of a gift was it to have characters like the ones Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater play, to basically serve as protagonists?
MACMANUS: You said it right there, it was a gift. And, that is something that I've talked about dating back three years ago — I don't want to undermine whatever modicum of talent that I brought to the table, I definitely don't want to undermine our writers because if it weren't for them, we wouldn't have the show that we have, but it was, in many ways, a ready baked-in story, right? You have these compelling heroes in Henderson and Kirby that are unlike, in my opinion, unlike other quote-unquote "heroes" in the true crime space, because these are two who are taking down one of their own. And it isn't like cops taking down one of their own. These are doctors who didn't sign up to become heroes, right? They were trying to process the horror that was Christopher Duntsch as they were going along, because they couldn't answer the question that we began with: "Why does he do what he did?" The real Dr. Henderson and Dr. Kirby could never answer that question, to this day.
So, to be able to have someone who a true believer in the system in Henderson play up against somebody who is, for lack of a better or more tropy word, a maverick within the system, in Dr. Kirby, and to have a character like Kirby who infuses humor into everything that he does, the real life character, I think, we underplayed his humor quite frankly, was a blessing or a gift as you say to us as writers. It was fun to write these two characters.
Dr. Death is available now on Peacock.