Bad Surgeon · Blue Caprice · The Big Bankroll
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The crime
Strictly speaking, they finally got Paolo Macchiarini on aggravated assault, but there’s also research fraud…which Macchiarini braided into various love frauds in quite a sophisticated fashion.
The story
The story of how, and with whose unwitting help, Macchiarini crossed the fraud streams is about to pass the saturation point at the end of next week — that’s when the second season of Peacock’s Dr. Death hits the streamer — and unfortunately for the Mandy Moore/Edgar Ramírez scripted take, any number of more efficient and compelling versions of the narrative have already dropped. Among them is Netflix’s Bad Surgeon: Love Under The Knife, and while that algo-humping subtitle is so corny that it probably belongs in the section above this one, plus the miniseries isn’t “mini” enough, I do recommend it.
The most satisfying-per-minute-spent experience of the case isn’t Bad Surgeon, of course; it’s the original Vanity Fair barn-burner from 2016. But Bad Surgeon, despite getting released at the end of November in an evident attempt to beat Dr. Death to market, doesn’t feel rushed, and it does things the VF piece can’t — and not just case-update things. Director Ben Steele (In Memoriam, among others) carefully moves the two stories forward in the same timeline, a few minutes with Benita Alexander’s story, then a few in Sweden with the artificial tracheae, weaving an impression of Macchiarini and then beginning to pull the threads. That may not sound remarkable, but I frankly had no expectation of finishing an entire episode, much less the series, given how much time I’d already spent with the story in recent weeks1, and how little patience I had left for iterations of it that didn’t interrogate Alexander’s lapses of journalistic ethics. Yeah, Alexander’s line-crossing isn’t as serious as Macchiarini’s…but didn’t it provide him cover? And isn’t her very eager participation in related projects perhaps motivated by a desire to reframe her shocking credulity more sympathetically?