Keri Anderson / Netflix
Because every streaming platform apparently feels compelled to take Purdue Pharma to the woodshed for its prime role in creating the American opioid epidemic, Netflix follows Hulu (Dopesick) and HBO (The Crime of the Century) with Painkiller, a drama about the nefariousness of the pharmaceutical company and its owners, the Sacklers.
Channeling the rapid-fire energy of The Big Short, minus all the cutesy fourth wall-breaking, this six-part dramatic series from showrunners Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, executive producer Alex Gibney, and director Peter Berg is a propulsive and compulsively watchable evisceration of the company that created a nationwide crisis. Its vehement rage at the Sacklers knows no bounds and is only matched by its empathy for those reduced to collateral damage by the family’s quest for wealth and power.
Based on Barry Meier’s book Pain Killer, as well as Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker article “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,” Painkiller (Aug. 10) frames its multi-pronged story through the questioning of Edie (an intense Uzo Aduba). An investigator with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Roanoke, Virginia, Edie agrees to recount her past inquiry into Purdue Pharma to federal lawyers once she realizes that the firm’s president, Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick), has finally been deposed.