True Crime Tuesdays: Painkiller
Review Overview
Style
6Substance
5Pain
6Helen Archer | On 22, Aug 2023
It’s hard not to compare Netflix’s Painkiller with Disney+’s Dopesick: both deal in the same story – that of the Sackler family’s company Purdue Pharma, and their role in the OxyContin epidemic – both are fictionalised versions of true stories, and both series have a similar structure. Stylistically, though, they are worlds apart. Painkiller goes with an MTV tone, all fast cut montages, loud music and a speed and superficiality to the story, while Dopesick takes a more in-depth, soulful, and ultimately more effective approach.
Based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker article, The Family that Built an Empire of Pain, and on the book Pain Killer by Barry Meier – both of whom get series writing credits, along with Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster – Painkiller is directed by Peter Berg, best known as the creator of Friday Night Lights. Matthew Broderick stars as Dr Richard Sackler, a man who blankly roams his baroque mansion, where an errant alarm is the only thing which upsets his sleep, and is ‘visited’ by apparitions of the late Arthur Sackler (Clark Gregg), his uncle and the founder of the Sackler empire.
Uzo Aduba plays Edie Flowers, a lawyer whose mission to bring down the Sacklers previously stalled due to their ability to buy themselves out of trouble via court settlements. Called in to share her knowledge with a team who are building a new case, Flowers is initially hesitant to get involved, but, when she realises the team have managed to depose Sackler, the urgency with which she tells her story propels the narrative. She, too, has a personal connection to addiction – her mother lost to the crack epidemic of the 1980s, her brother in prison for dealing the drug that consumed her. More could be made of the similarities and the differences between the two epidemics, but the viewer is left to draw their own conclusions.
Like Dopesick, Painkiller focuses on the story of one person’s descent into opioid addiction – Taylor Kitsch plays Glen Kryger, the blue collar family man who gets injured at work and is prescribed OxyContin. Meanwhile, Shannon Shaeffer (West Duchovny) is the sales rep who is too caught up in a capitalist whirlwind, encouraged by her ‘mentor’ Britt (Dina Shihabi), to care that she’s punting highly addictive opiates as harmless painkillers.
Aduba’s palpable frustration and anger carries the show, to such an extent that the other actors, and story strands, suffer in comparison. There is a cartoonish feel to the scenes of the sales reps, especially as the series progresses, and there is little in the way of depth or character-building. Glen’s story is so universal as to lose specificity, and tension dissipates rather than builds as we check in on the various timelines of the drama.
Painkiller could be seen as surplus to requirements – it is a story that has already been told, in various forms. And yet there will still be some viewers coming to it cold, shocked anew. It’s also very bingeable, in that Netflix-specific way – though it is oddly unaffecting, save for the opening of each episode, as parents share their memories of the children they have lost to OxyContin, and the pain of living without them. Their stories – though too numerous to tell – are important reminders of the damage done by a system that rewards the rich for destroying the poor.