Hulu’s “Dopesick” is a capital-D Drama, a “very important” series that’s about nothing less than how this country has been torn apart by greed and addiction related to the sale of Oxycontin. Creator Danny Strong (“Recount,” “Game Change”) and directors like Barry Levinson and Michael Cuesta guide a remarkable ensemble in a “Traffic”-esque approach to the opioid crisis in the heartland of America from its origins in corporate boardrooms to its impact in American living rooms. Jumping back and forth in time with a dozen or so regular characters, Strong endeavors to put a human face on all sides of a story that is often broken down to statistics.
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The result is a complex study of how a major company, primarily driven by one man who wanted to impress his father, ignored the warnings and bent the rules to enhance the bottom line, convincing people that Oxycontin was the cure for all their pain without any of the addictive problems of traditional opioids. “Dopesick” can get a little lost in its own history, throwing so many characters and revelations up against the screen that too few of them have time for nuance or depth. The cast does its best to make up for that, turning characters that can feel like mouthpieces into genuine people, but they sometimes succumb to what’s ultimately a dour, depressing reminder of how broken the prescription drug system is in this country from top to bottom.
Adapting Beth Macy’s Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America, Strong takes a multi-faceted approach to a story that has impacted millions of people. On one end of the spectrum, there’s smalltown doctor Samuel Finnix (Michael Keaton), a medical practitioner in a community supported by coal mining, the kind of profession where pain management is just a fact of life. Prescribing Tylenol for most of his life, Finnix is one of those folksy souls who now treats the adults that he once delivered into this world, but Keaton imbues him with a warm intelligence. He’s skeptical of the tenacious pharma rep (Will Poulter) who sells him on the miracle cure known as Oxycontin, but also hopeful that it can help patients who feel like extended family. The human cost of Oxy wasn’t just for the addicts themselves, but also the doctors misled by an industry that they needed to trust in order to do their jobs.
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The other end of that spectrum is Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbarg), the creepy chairman and president of Purdue Pharma, the developer of Oxycontin. Stuhlbarg plays Sackler like a Universal Monster movie villain up in a dark castle, loping through his mansion, entirely unconcerned about anything like human cost. In the third episode, when he speaks about overcoming the restrictions so they can sell the pills in Germany, it feels like a dictator seeking world domination. While Sackler’s “profits over people” motives have been well-documented, and he certainly doesn’t need image rehabilitation in a mini-series, the presentation here feels a bit too easy. He might as well be twirling a handlebar mustache. He needed to be a more minor character or a more complex one.
If Sackler and Fennix are the polar opposites of morality, “Dopesick” also spends hours with people in the middle. There’s miner Betsy Mallum (Kaitlyn Dever), who struggles with addiction after an accident on the job, while also being forced to hide her sexuality from her conservative parents (Ray McKinnon, Mare Winningham). Too much of the family drama in Dever’s arc feels like it’s from another show. It’s meant to further illuminate the human lives of people reduced to statistics and how drug addiction can become an out for people dealing with more than just physical pain, but it verges on miserabilism.
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There are other heroes here too, although most of them feel the sting of a pharmaceutical industry with more power than it ever should have been given. An effectively righteous Peter Sarsgaard and John Hoogenakker play the agents who saw the growing addiction rates in the heartland went after Purdue while Rosario Dawson’s Bridget Meyer thinks she’s been given the freedom by the government to do some good but faces roadblock after roadblock.
Taken as a whole, “Dopesick” struggles with pace and tone. The choice to jump chronologically and across the country drains momentum from individual arcs. For example, Betsy’s story is tragic, but moving in and out of it makes it feel episodic, especially in how quickly she goes from girlfriend/daughter to quivering addict, which might be truthful but feels like melodrama. Despite the talented Dever’s best efforts, she starts to feel like a character that’s there merely to manipulate our emotions by getting viewers out of the boardrooms and doctor’s offices where most of the story takes place.
It doesn’t help that Strong and his team are more than willing to lean into cliché to make a point. Did a truly sham doctor tell Purdue sales reps that “If people are suffering, they need a higher dose,” to rapturous applause? Maybe, but dialogue like this works against the show’s best intentions by making it feel too easy instead of leaning into what the drama really needs to do: humanize the cliché.
“Dopesick” is the term that’s used for when people are in actual medical need for another fix, when not getting another drug, even one they’re addicted to, would be worse for their body than going cold turkey. For people who don’t know the extent of a problem that led to a term like this even existing, “Dopesick” could be educational. The fact that a system basically allowed a company like Purdue to claim that their drug wasn’t addictive without having to prove it is one of the greatest broad-scale tragedies of the modern era. And the more people understand that addiction is a far greater issue than sheer willpower, the better. It’s just too bad that the message couldn’t be delivered in a way that didn’t so often feel like homework. [C+]
“Dopesick” premieres on Hulu on October 13.
