Dr. Death. Scott McDermott/Peacock Midway through Peacock’s new eight-part show Dr. Death, Dallas County assistant district attorney Michelle Shughart (AnnaSophia Robb) tries to wrap her mind around one of Texas’s most horrifying malpractice cases. It’s 2012, and for two years spine surgeon Dr. Christopher Duntsch has been cutting his way across North Texas operating rooms, injuring, paralyzing, and occasionally killing his patients in surgeries of such staggering ineptitude that, as one assisting nurse describes to a doctor, “It was like he learned what to do just so he could do the opposite.” Shughart—and the show as a whole—wants to answer a big question: was Duntsch alone at fault for maiming, and in some cases killing, 33 people? She tells doctors Randall Kirby (Christian Slater) and Bob Henderson (Alec Baldwin), who have lobbied hard for, and are now assisting, her criminal investigation: “I’m going to tell a jury both that Christopher Duntsch is so, so bad . . . and that nobody”—not Dallas hospitals, not the Texas Medical Board—“did anything,” despite knowing about his incompetence.