Netflix’s Painkiller Is a Garish Caricature

There’s a mystery at the heart of Painkiller, the new Netflix series about OxyContin and the opioid crisis, but it’s not how the Sackler family reconciled their consciences to making billions off a drug that would ruin communities and help spark an epidemic that’s claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The mystery isn’t why it took so long for authorities to recognize what Purdue, the Sacklers’ pharmaceutical company, was doing and to try to stop it. Instead, the mystery is why anyone who’d seen Dopesick, Hulu’s magisterial 2021 miniseries on the same subject, would decide that what the world needs is another version—only glib, garish, and ham-fisted.

The story Painkiller has to tell is complex. Dopesick relies on revolving timestamps to orient viewers when its multiple narratives bounced around the 40-year period between the drug’s development in 1980 and the near-present. Painkiller relies on the poor man’s storytelling crutch: extensive voice-over. This is delivered by Uzo Aduba, who plays a fictional character, Edie Flowers, a lawyer at the U.S. attorney’s office who lays out the history of Purdue and its misdeeds to a legal team poised to target the Sacklers themselves. The two series contain, essentially, the same components: Both feature corporate intrigue and a noble, workaholic female federal employee of color who vividly remembers the crack epidemic of the 1980s and is determined to nail the fat cats behind this new scourge. Both have a subplot about a decent working-class family destroyed when one of its members sustains a back injury on the job and becomes hooked on a prescription drug their doctor has been misled into thinking is nonaddictive. Both include a fresh-faced, young Purdue sales rep who initially revels in the profits to be made hard-selling physicians to prescribe ever-higher doses of OxyContin, only to experience growing doubts as the drug’s true nature becomes apparent. Both series show “junkies” rampaging through pharmacies and lines of shambling zombies standing outside “pain clinic” pill mills in depressed, postindustrial small towns.

But where Dopesick lingers over each of these storylines long enough to make the characters—the lesbian daughter of a pious coal mining family in Kentucky (Kaitlyn Dever), a widowed small-town doctor (Michael Keaton) who becomes addicted himself—feel like real people with real lives, everyone in Painkiller is a cartoon. Shaky cam shots and jittery fast cuts jangle over a soundtrack composed of beat-heavy tracks by the Beastie Boys, Iggy Pop, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard. There’s a lot of shouting and cutaways to montages of overexposed vintage footage: animated spacemen, faith healers, teeth being pulled, chocolate cheesecake, avalanches, and World War II newsreels. When Aduba’s voice-over refers to early drug trials in Puerto Rico, the viewer is treated to a lightning-fast spurt of images of palm trees, salsa dancers, and bikinied butts. At any moment a scene that appears meant to be realistic will inexplicably segue into bizarre fantasy, as when Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick), the mastermind behind OxyContin, poses with his father, Raymond (Sam Anderson), and uncle Mortimer (John Rothman) for publicity photos in front of Purdue’s offices, and the three men assume the postures of the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” monkeys. (In fact, the real-life Sackler family made a point of not drawing attention to their ownership of Purdue.)

Broderick’s Richard, in a performance evidently inspired by the Monopoly banker, remains largely impassive apart from moments when he mutters lines like “Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.” He spends a lot of his time conferring with the ghost of his uncle Arthur, the man who built the Sackler empire and created modern pharmaceutical marketing as we know it, but who died before OxyContin was developed. In the other storylines, a regional sales manager—a terrifying fembot played by Dina Shihabi in a series of skintight microdresses and six-inch heels—shrieks to her subordinates, “Do you want to make some fucking money? You’re going to sell and sell and sell and fucking sell!” while punching the air with the company’s promotional plushies as if they were boxing gloves. When Curtis Wright (Noah Harpster)—a real person and FDA staffer—initially refuses to approve the labeling of OxyContin, saying, “There’s a lot of drug in the tablet,” Raymond Sackler replies, “There’s a lot of dick in my pants about to go straight up your ass.” Eventually, Purdue talked Wright into approving the label, then hired him at a handsome salary. Painkiller depicts this with a scene in which Wright frolics on a diving board in a swimsuit with “OxyContin” written on the ass, flanked by two cheerleaders dressed in the drug’s branded colors shaking mylar pom-poms. Occasionally, the camera cuts to Richard in silk pajamas waltzing around his mansion with his uncle’s phantom.

Much of the time, Painkiller—with its frenetic tone and ludicrously steroidal dialogue—seems as if it were made by devotees of a substance a lot less enervating than opioids. Perhaps the show’s creators, Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster (who plays Curtis Wright), figured that Dopesick had cornered the market on sensitive, respectful, dramatic portrayals of this material. Maybe they thought the best way to distinguish their series would be to treat the Sacklers as if they were the antiheroes of a satirical movie about illegal drug dealers or multilevel marketing con men. About the only cliché Painkiller doesn’t stoop to is a scene of Broderick tossing paper bills into the air and rolling around on a king-size bed covered with money.

Someone involved in the project must have realized that telling the story of a deadly and ongoing epidemic with hyped-up, stylized performances and nightclub scenes of blonds in party dresses waving around Champagne bottles by the neck and hooting about their bonuses might come across as overly flippant. Presumably that’s why each episode of Painkiller opens with a real person explaining that, while the events in the show have been fictionalized, opioids’ effects on their own lives have been genuinely tragic. They hold up photos of their dead children. Some of them cry. This only manages to make the rest of the show seem even more grotesque. Painkiller’s fictionalized attempt to portray the toll of the epidemic, the story of a handsome garage owner and family man played by Taylor Kitsch, feels as generic as a new country music video in comparison.

Let’s extend a bit more credit to Fitzerman-Blue, Harpster, and director Peter Berg and assume that Painkiller plays like a brassy movie about cocaine dealers because it’s asserting that the Sacklers are no different than Pablo Escobar. Even so, the analogy doesn’t track. Gentility was the Sacklers’ secret weapon. They managed to elude justice for so long precisely because they didn’t do things like threaten to sodomize FDA regulators. Dopesick beautifully illustrates how the family operated in a bubble of elite respectability. They cared only about what other rich people thought of them, and in their eyes their philanthropic activities made them admirable. The nobodies they sold junk to lived in a world invisible to them. Broderick’s Richard Sackler is a sphinx whose only real relationship is with a ghost who carries on like Scarface. (The real Arthur Sackler, while completely unprincipled, was famously charming.) As played by Michael Stuhlbarg in Dopesick, the character makes more sense, an interpersonally inept scion determined to prove that he was as much a go-getter as the striving older generation of his clan.

Fitzerman-Blue and Harpster previously paired up to make 2019’s well-received Fred Rogers biopic, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, giving no sign of this colossal lapse of judgment in their future. How to explain the existence of Painkiller, then? Your guess is as good as mine.