It’s 2017. Duntsch sits handcuffed to a prison doctor’s exam table, his glare boring into the camera as testimony from his victims echoes in voiceover: “I woke up in a nightmare.” “Every bone hurt.” “I was worse.” “What has he done to me?”

The answer begins five years earlier in suburban Dallas, where Dr. Duntsch is about to operate on Madeline Beyer (Maryann Plunkett), an older woman with back pain. It does not go well. Surveying Ms. Beyer’s mangled spine during revision surgery, Dr. Robert Henderson (Alec Baldwin) is stunned: “It looks like putty, just smashed in there.”

Part medical drama, part mystery, part Catch Me If You Can thriller, Dr. Death begins with the dread level at a 10 and just keeps cranking it higher. Hopping between multiple timelines in Duntsch’s life — dashed college football hopes in 1991; launching a stem-cell research startup in 2009; landing a coveted neurosurgery gig at Baylor Plano in 2011, marking the start of his disastrous run — the eight episodes mosaic together a damning portrait of a doctor whose great-on-paper credentials masked an appalling lack of training and skill.