Season 1 • Episode 8
LatestJoseph Helfgot and James Maki have lived in different worlds. Helfgot has been a successful Hollywood marketing executive and the son of Auschwitz survivors. Maki is a mixed Blackfoot Indian and Japanese orphan adopted by an academic Japanese- American family. Maki's father was assigned the prestigious duty of helping draft the postwar Japanese Constitution. The son, deeply in conflict with his strict, successful family, dropped out of college to fight in Vietnam. He returned a heroin addict, drifter and criminal, soon abandoning his wife and baby daughter. Fate brings Helfgot and Maki together in the operating rooms of one of America's top hospitals. In the second face transplant ever performed in the U.S., one man takes part of another man's identity. The surgery is headed by Bo Pomahac, a brilliant plastic surgeon who, two decades ago, fled communist Czechoslovakia to arrive on these shores practically penniless. Pomahac could not have imagined that he would one day make medical history.
From operating rooms to end-of-life meetings, the documentary series explores the culture of doctors and nurses and the conversations that happen outside the patient's earshot.
Editing
Razor-sharp cuts between OR adrenaline and quiet devastation.
Production
Unprecedented access to real conversations nurses have in supply closets.
Writing
No script needed—life wrote the most brutal lines.
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Part of ABC News' hospital trilogy alongside Hopkins and NY Med, this launched the 'trauma porn' documentary wave.
Several featured doctors later left medicine entirely; the series captured pre-pandemic burnout that only worsened.
US
