‘Painkiller’ Wants This to Hurt

Painkiller chooses to document what the Sacklers and their allies knowingly did rather than why they did it, because not every villain needs an origin story.
Photo: KERI ANDERSON/NETFLIX/KERI ANDERSON/NETFLIX

In the contemptuous, engrossing, and consistently upsetting Painkiller, America’s health-care system has blood on its hands, and everyone involved is complicit. Avarice and ego are dually devastating forces, steering the Purdue Pharma executives who used deceitful marketing to make billions off OxyContin, the sales reps who sold a drug they didn’t understand, the doctors who overprescribed to pocket more from insurance companies, and the government agencies who rubber-stamped instead of regulated. Painkiller distributes its scorn as reflexively and easily as doctors once wrote scripts for Oxy, and the effect is one of infectious resentment and queasy disgust. The series overdoes it on Adam McKay–esque fourth-wall-breaking dialogue, on-the-nose needle drops, and B-roll used to literalize symbolic themes, but the anger that drives Painkiller feels righteous, and its refusal to sympathize with its villains feels right. This story about pain wants to inflict it, too, and that purpose is as exorcizing as it is justified.

A sense of déjà vu when considering Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster’s new six-episode Netflix series is understandable, given that Danny Strong’s Emmy-winning Hulu miniseries Dopesick, also about the OxyContin epidemic, came out less than two years ago. They have different source material but cover the same period in American history; feature many of the same Sackler family members, Purdue Pharma employees, and government representatives as characters; and similarly center an injured worker who increasingly relies on Oxy as a representative of the drug’s human toll. They also each trace how Purdue Pharma developed the opioid (a chemical cousin of heroin that is twice as powerful as morphine) while disregarding its addictive properties, deflecting responsibility as abuse of the drug ramped up, and maneuvering its way out of criminal prosecution over and over again.

But what Painkiller most effectively emphasizes is how everyone involved in making and selling the drug marketed to pain-suffering patients and gullible doctors as “the one to start with and the one to stay with” was going through their own cycle of addiction, American-capitalism style: getting high on the money, spending it lavishly and selfishly, hiding behind philanthropy and manipulated science to maintain their reputations, and doing whatever they needed to do to get another fix. Every executive, physician, lawyer, and salesperson is at fault, and in targeting its blame at them, Painkiller maintains a devastating purity of focus. Not every villain needs an origin story, and Painkiller’s deliberate choice to document what the Sacklers and their allies knowingly did rather than why they did it aligns with the series’ overall argument: There’s a deep rot within America’s pharmaceutical industry that has negatively affected countless other areas of commerce, too.

Through various subplots and character arcs that jump around the 20th and 21st centuries, Painkiller lays out an interconnected web of fault and harm. (There’s a fair amount of fictional license here, which Painkiller admits, but the most dispiriting details, especially how Purdue Pharma shielded itself by hiring and paying off its detractors, are pulled from the New Yorker article on which the series is partially based.) The deposition that U.S. Attorney’s office lawyer and investigator Edie Flowers (Uzo Aduba) gives to a team of litigators going after Purdue Pharma serves as our narrative guide: Her weariness with and revulsion toward the Sacklers are Painkiller’s emotional guardrails, and her exposition details how physician Arthur Sackler (Clark Gregg) built the family’s dynasty through decades of shady business practices, and how his nephew, Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick), continued Arthur’s work by adapting what had been an end-of-life painkiller into Oxy, which the company pushed for all kinds of ailments, from arthritis to back pain. Flowers also, starkly and unsympathetically, lays out how Purdue Pharma amassed armies of attractive young people (represented here by Dina Shihabi and West Duchovny) to convince doctors to push the pill, and she takes aim at the federal agencies, in particular the FDA, who were practically derelict in their duties of evaluating Oxy’s effects.

As Flowers’s deposition links the top-level mistakes that led to Oxy’s omnipresence, Painkiller also cuts back and forth between people who are prescribed and become addicted to the drug, in particular mechanic Glen Kryger (Taylor Kitsch). When following these characters, Painkiller is sometimes grueling to watch: overdosed teens abandoned on their parents’ lawns, a high Glen unaware that he’s brushing his teeth so vigorously that he spits out a mouthful of blood, a medical examiner performing an autopsy and cutting open a stomach dotted through with a half-dozen undigested pills. But Painkiller is judicious with those moments, making the resulting shock and despair even more potent.

In adapting 2017’s “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,” by Patrick Radden Keefe, and the 2018 book Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic, by Barry Meier, Fitzerman-Blue and Harpster have a proper partner in director Peter Berg, whose allegiances have long been with America’s blue-collar workers and small-town citizens. Sometimes that’s resulted in exceptionally empathetic projects that highlight the meaning of community (both the movie and TV versions of Friday Night Lights), and sometimes that’s manifested as Mark Wahlberg films that are barely more than rah-rah nationalism (Lone Survivor, Patriots Day). But Berg does exceptionally well with highlighting the humanity of people who keep this country running, day in and day out, and where Painkiller lets him be direct and unfussy, he elevates those subjects into heroes and martyrs. The performances Berg gets out of frequent collaborator Kitsch as doomed working man Glen, Aduba as principled warrior Edie, and John Ales as the rare doctor speaking out against Oxy are the soul of Painkiller, and their stories are the grounded element the show needs to demonstrate the impact of Purdue Pharma’s long-allowed criminality.

The actors’ urgency, and the clarity with which Fitzerman-Blue and Harpster weave together the series’ social and financial threads, create a strong and substantial core to Painkiller that almost gets buried under gratuitous cinematographic and editing flourishes. There are some corny moments, like a graphic of the Sackler name crumbling into dust, and the miniseries is tiring — even tedious — when it borrows tactics from based-in-real-life films like The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street to amp up the absurdity of this story. It almost feels like the writing team worried that Purdue Pharma’s history and tactics would bore viewers, so they loaded up that subplot with old-timey B-roll (like wrecking balls and trench warfare when the Sacklers tell their company reps to “never surrender”) and slightly distasteful visuals (including sales reps having sex with a gigantic Oxy-pill plush at a company retreat) to maintain our interest. Painkiller shouldn’t have worried. Its villains are monstrous enough — Broderick effectively impersonal as the image-obsessed Richard, a leering Ned Van Zandt as Purdue Pharma hire Rudy Giuliani, Shihabi going against type as the cruelly bullying veteran sales rep Britt — and what they got away with absorbing enough that the series’ maximalist treatment often feels unnecessary. Through its comprehensive recounting of a still-timely, avoidable national tragedy and the effective performances that complement those realities, Painkiller operates like Oxy’s own time-release mechanism. Its devastation lingers.