As of last year, over a million people have died of opioid overdoses in the United States. The central culprits, as outlined in Netflix’s latest miniseries, “Painkiller,” are Purdue Pharma and the “non-addictive” prescription drug they marketed to anyone with a pulse and a toothache: OxyContin. It’s a distinctly American tragedy — painful, self-inflicted, motivated by avarice, and, sadly, nowhere near adequately addressed even decades on. There have been plenty of attempts to chart the origins of this crisis on the big and small screens, from documentaries (“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” “The Crime of the Century”) to, fittingly, other prestige streaming miniseries (Hulu’s acclaimed “Dopesick.”) Director Peter Berg’s turn at bat is an overly glib affair that leans a bit too hard into its arch, devious tone to give such apocalyptic material the gravity it deserves.
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Based on the books by Patrick Radden Keefe (The Family That Built an Empire of Pain) and Barry Meier (Pain Killer: An Empire of Defeat and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic) and written/created by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, “Painkiller” attacks the rise of the opioid crisis from multiple angles. There’s Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick), president of Purdue, who follows his uncle Arthur’s (Clark Gregg) playbook for squeezing profit out of healthcare: Turn the pills into products. He understands humanity as an ongoing cycle of impulses — “Run from pain, run toward pleasure.”
He sends out a phalanx of bottle-blonde sales reps (including West Duchovny as an up-and-comer, taken under Dina Shihabi’s type-A girlboss wing) to charm doctors into prescribing OxyContin, armed with fuzzy pill-shaped plushies and hollow assurances that the drug is “less than 1 percent” addictive. And it works, Oxy becoming the de facto drug of choice right under the FDA’s noses; before long, it’s in the hands of workaday joes like injured Glen County mechanic Glen Kryger (Taylor Kitsch), sold a bill of goods on the medicine’s effectiveness before he slowly falls prey to dependency and addiction. The only folks with any marginal ability to stop the Sacklers are the US attorney’s office, led here by investigator Edie Flowers (Uzo Aduba), who have to contend not just with the Sacklers’ deep pockets but the fact that what they’re doing technically isn’t a crime.
“Painkiller”’s presentation doesn’t stray far from the formula Adam McKay pioneered in 2015’s “The Big Short” — coat dry, depressing material in enough needle drops, stunt castings, and reams of exposition to make it palatable to the average binge-watcher. When we first see Broderick’s Richard Sackler, he’s awakened in his enormous mansion by the beep of a smoke detector he can’t find. Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” plays in these opening minutes, just one of many on-the-nose needle drops you’ll have to suffer through over the miniseries’ six episodes. (The music supervisor saw fit to include both “Candy” and “I Want Candy” in the show’s breathless montages of Purdue’s sales machine, in case you didn’t get it the first time).
It’s a difficult tonal balance to strike at the best of times, and Berg only occasionally manages it. The “Big Short”-ification is meant to make everything feel flashy and satirical, but it just grates. We’re meant to gasp when Rudy Giuliani shows up as one of Purdue’s high-ticket defense lawyers in the final stretches. But the wink is too overt; by the time you get to him, it elicits little but a groan.
Where “Dopesick” was a somber, serious affair that made clear the very real casualties of this crisis, Berg et al. choose to contrast the human cost against the cartoonish levels of fun the people at the top were having, laughing all the way to the bank no matter how many bodies they have to step over. Much like that other miniseries, “Painkiller” similarly suffers from massive pacing issues and the episodic flitting between a half dozen storylines with only Aduba’s narration to carry us through.
The performances are compelling, though, especially Aduba, whose no-nonsense Edie Flowers carries the wry charisma of a ‘90s Whoopi Goldberg character. Duchovny’s girl-next-door sales rep contrasts nicely with the good-old-boy anguish Kitsch is so very good at; the show plays both of their characters in parallel, both of them pimped out to the Sackler system of drug-fueled greed from opposite ends of the transaction.
Even Broderick’s, well, broad performance fits well with the show’s cartoonish rendering of Sackler; his boyish face, even in his sixties, carries a kind of gormless inadequacy that emphasizes Richard’s gnawing desire to live up to his shark of an uncle (played out as overwrought devil-on-the-shoulder scenes opposite a ghostlike Gregg). But the show doesn’t nail the moral equivocations of its characters the way it thinks; Berg et al. clearly want to show that Sackler and the Purdue reps don’t believe they are doing something wrong but can only really think to show it by having characters state outright that they’re not bad people.
“Painkiller” is undoubtedly well-intentioned, and it’s a breezy, poppy introduction to the opioid crisis, who’s responsible, and the many brazen ways they prioritized profit over people’s lives. But in a world where more startling, heartbreaking portraits of the Sackler family’s evil exist elsewhere on the big and small screens, “Painkiller” comes across as more than a little self-congratulatory, even as it settles down to sell high drama in its final episodes. It’s all down to that smoke detector, beeping at Richard Sackler like the tell-tale heart.
At the beginning of each episode, a family member of one of OxyContin’s victims offers up the typical based-on-a-true-story disclaimer: Events, characters, and dialogue have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes… but their late loved one wasn’t. It’s a beautiful touch, a stark reminder that all the flashy chicanery on display had a real, human cost. But it’s also an indicator that these issues are probably best explored in documentary form, with the real people in front of your face to sell the crisis. “Painkiller” tries to offer the same medicine but has to dilute its potency to fit its thick, sugary shell around it. [C]