DR. DEATH CREATOR PATRICK MACMANUS ON ADAPTING THE HIT PODCAST FOR TV
First Published on TheTelevixen.com
PATRICK MACMANUS TALKS ABOUT ADAPTING THE HIT PODCAST, DR. DEATH, INTO A LIMITED SERIES STARRING JOSHUA JACKSON.
Often, the scariest horror stories out there are the ones based on true stories. It couldn’t be more true than it is in the story of Christopher Duntsch, the subject of the first season of hit podcast, Dr. Death. That story was turned into a limited series released on Peacock back in July, and on Showcase in Canada beginning this weekend.
Patrick Macmanus, creator and executive producer, adapted Dr. Death into a series starring Joshua Jackson as Christopher Duntsch, and co-starring Christian Slater, Alec Baldwin and AnnaSophia Robb. Macmanus recently spoke with us about bringing this story to the small screen. We touched on the importance of highlighting what allowed Duntsch to get away with what he did for so long, and working with Joshua Jackson on a chilling performance.
How did you become involved in adapting Dr. Death for TV, and why was this something you wanted to work on?
Honestly, it was dumb luck on my part. I was working on another show in New York called Happy. I was sent the first two or three episodes of the Dr. Death podcast by Wondery and Escape Artists, who were our producing partners. And I was immediately taken by it, specifically by the characters. Christopher Duntsch was an extraordinarily fascinating “bad guy.” He was not one or two-dimensional, but a fully fleshed out, three-dimensional person.
Regardless of what I’m about to say, Duntsch deserves to be in jail for the rest of his life. He was somebody with a great future in front of him if he’d stayed in research and never gone into surgery. He was very intelligent, very driven, and had a great mind for research. His patents are still used today, which is fascinating. And we’d be talking about him a lot differently if he’d stayed in that realm.