The premiere episode of the gripping and stylishly rendered Netflix limited series “Painkiller” begins in documentary fashion, with a woman named Jen Trejo telling us, “This program is based on real events. However, certain characters, names, incidents, locations and dialogue have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes. What wasn’t fictionalized is that my son [Christopher] at the age of 15 was prescribed OxyContin. He lived in years and years of addiction … and at the age of 32, he died, all alone in the freezing cold in a gas station parking lot, and we miss him.”
Each of the six chapters in the series begins with tragic testimony from someone who has lost a loved one to opioid addiction, and it shakes us to the core. We’re then plunged into a story that is fictionalized but carries the ring of essential truth. Based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker article “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” and Barry Meier’s “Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic,” with all six episodes directed by Peter Berg (“Friday Night Lights,” “Deepwater Horizon,” “Patriots Day”), this is a well-plotted and expertly acted story outlining how the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma created the pain-relieving prescription drug OxyContin.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the prescription pain reliever spread across the land like a raging wildfire, due in large part to marketing and promotion efforts, with salespeople engaging in boots-on-the-ground (or often, high heels on the ground) campaigns to get doctors to prescribe Oxy as a new and improved and more beneficial approach to alleviating pain.
With a fast-paced, quick-cut style that never gets too flashy at the expense of storytelling and shifts in tone to reflect a particular plot line, “Painkiller” features four primary storylines that occasionally intersect:
- In a powerful and resonant performance, the Emmy-award winning Uzo Aduba (“Orange Is the New Black”) is Edie Flowers (a composite character), a doggedly determined, no-nonsense investigator for the U.S. Attorney’s office who in the late 1990s becomes aware of a new pain-relieving drug that has sprung up like a million dandelions. Edie becomes our guide, explaining how the Sackler family developed OxyContin and managed to win the game-changing approval of the stubborn, real-life FDA medical officer Curtis Wright (Noah Harpster) — who then entered the private sector to work for … Purdue Pharma. Tyler Ritter also does stellar work as U.S. Attorney John Brownlee, who is convinced to go after Purdue Pharma.
- The wonderful Clark Gregg is the psychiatrist and family patriarch Arthur Sackler, an early pioneer in the field of medical advertising and the pharmaceutical revolution. (Arthur calls Thorazine “a lobotomy in a bottle,” and says Valium is “the drug you never knew you needed.”) An inspired piece of casting has one of the most likable actors of our time, Matthew Broderick, playing Arthur’s nephew Richard Sackler, who marshaled through the development of OxyContin. Like most villains, Richard never sees himself as such. He believes, or at least tells himself, he’s helping millions of Americans live better lives through pain management. Those troubling tens of thousands of opioid addiction deaths? Blame them on the abusers, not the supplier.
- On the sales side, Dina Shihabi is the beautiful and manipulative Britt Hufford, a Purdue Pharma sales rep with an almost cult-like devotion to her job who recruits former college athlete Shannon Schaeffer (West Duchovny) to join her on the road in her Porsche and go from hospital to hospital, doctor’s office to doctor’s office, medical conference to medical conference, to flirt with physicians and hand them samples and coupons and pitch them on the miraculous qualities of OxyContin, which Britt claims has an addiction rate of less than 1%. The early, nearly giddy scenes of Britt and Shannon living it up are like a cross between “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Goodfellas,” with Shannon initially going all-in on the slick and aggressive sales style, and reaping the rewards in shoes, cars, cash and parties.
- Bringing it home: a storyline set in North Carolina, with Taylor Kitsch doing some of his best work as Glen Kryger, a mechanic, small business owner and solid family man who sustains a brutal back injury on the job and is rendered nearly immobile by the post-surgical pain — until his friendly neighborhood doctor prescribes OxyContin, which produces such amazing results at first that Glen appears in a promotional film for Purdue Pharma. As addiction takes its hold on Glen, we see his family torn apart, pill by pill. (Carolina Bartczak also does fine work as Glen’s wife, Lily. When Glen overdoses and a physician voices concern about possible addiction, Lily regurgitates the “1%” line and the doc replies, “I’ve got an ER filled with the 1 percent.”) In one of the most devastatingly effective scenes in the series, we cut back and forth between Pharma Purdue reps testifying to Congress that their product is safe, that it’s not their fault that addicts and criminals are abusing it, and scenes of Glen resorting to buying Oxy on the street, crushing it and snorting it.
In later episodes, “Painkiller” at times veers into heavy-handed messaging, as we see how the respective main storylines play out as a kind of morality play. Still, this is an invaluable and at times heartbreakingly effective piece of work.
