Painkiller is a social drama mini-series based on Keefe’s New Yorker article “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” and the book Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic by Barry Meier. It is written by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, and directed by Peter Berg. There are 6 episodes with a runtime of about 42-60 minutes.
The cast of the series includes Uzo Aduba as Edie Flowers, Matthew Broderick as Richard Sackler, Sam Anderson as Raymond Sackler, Taylor Kitsch as Glen Kryger, Carolina Bartczak as Lily Kryger, Tyler Ritter as John Brownlee, John Ales as Dr Gregory Fitzgibbons, Ron Lea as Bill Havens, Ana Cruz Kayne as Brianna Ortiz, West Duchovny as Shannon Schaeffer, Jack Mulhern as Tyler Kryger, Dina Shihabi as Britt, John Rothman as Mortimer Sackler, John Murphy as Michael Friedman, Noah Harpster and several others.
Painkiller Review
The series starts with Matthew Broderick’s character Richard Sackler, waking up to a beeping noise coming from somewhere in his house. He can’t figure out from which alarm it is coming & it drives him insane. Eventually, it becomes a background sound for the character, beeping throughout the series, as a way to show that he might have a small conscience about the things he is doing but instead ignores it. Another striking thing in the series is how the disclaimer is given by the parents of actual victims, who lost their lives due to OxyContin addiction.
The show presents the relationship between Arthur Sackler and his Nephew Richard, from becoming his role model as a kid to following his roadmap, when he took hold of the Purdue Pharma. It’s like Arthur’s ghost keeps Richard company in his lonely life in a big mansion and when important decisions to make. The series displays how Richard repackaged the drug given to cancer patients (MS Contin) and started selling it as OxyContin, with a little tweak, hiding the lethal risks of the addictive drug.
We get an overview of how they used vibrant advertising, hired good-looking fresh graduates to sell their drugs to the doctors and often imparted misleading information to their benefit. The person who crusaded the pirate ship is shown to be Edie Flowers, a lawyer in the US attorney’s Roanoke office. Before someone wonders if she was the actual person who investigated the wrongdoings of Purdue, then no, she is a fictional composite character who is created by combining different people involved in the real case.
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Edie works as a narrator since she is the one retelling her account of how she discovered everything and how close they got to persecuting the company in the early 2000s. Like all big corporations and their connections, Purdue Pharma was able to evade the charges at that time, until they admitted in a lawsuit in 2020 that they intentionally conspired to push the opioid as a general pain relieving medicine, despite knowing its side effects.
The creators have tried to show two more perspectives – one of a mechanic who gets addicted to the drug after being prescribed by his doctor, due to an accident. And another is a salesperson, a young and naive girl who persuades doctors to prescribe the said drug more and more, so they both can make good money out of it. Her story is similar to getting indoctrinated into a selling cult, getting blinded by all the money and at last trying to get out of the vicious cycle but it turns too late.
You get that the creators are trying to give a detailed account of how the opioid epidemic came to be and who is responsible for it and the ones on the receiving end of it. But it’s still an incomplete account, as they don’t delve into the numerous other lawsuits/details over the year, which eventually caught the company responsible by 2019-2020.
The majority of the show is fictional with some real accounts imbibed here and there. There’s no clear distinction between what’s actually happened and what’s made up, which can be quite confusing if you are taking it as an exact retelling of a real event. Overall, Matthew Broderick does bring up a purely evil character on the screen, quite subtly, while Uzo Aduba grounds the story with her remarkable performance.
If anything then the series is an example of how big corporations take advantage of other’s pain and grief and turn it into a money-making plant, even if it’s complete mayhem, in the real world. Purdue’s OxyContin shows how they first create a problem, and then come up with a solution too (like Purdue came out with a new drug to treat the addiction problem created by OxyContin) as they only care about making profits, regardless of consequences.
Rating: 3/5
Painkiller is currently available for streaming on Netflix.
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