Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Painkiller’ On Netflix, Where Matthew Broderick And Uzo Aduba Star In A Semi-Fictional Story About The Opioid Crisis (2024)

Two years ago, Dopesick, a star-studded miniseries that detailed the origins of our country’s opioid crisis through the story of how OxyContin dominated the market, debuted to generally good reviews. It received a slew of Emmy nominations, with Michael Keaton bringing an Emmy home for his role. Now, Netflix has a new, star-studded miniseries about the origins of the opioid crisis, told via the story of how OxyContin dominated the market. But this one is told a lot differently.

PAINKILLER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The mother of real-life OxyContin victim Christopher Trejo gives the disclaimer that the story being told in Painkiller is fictionalized. Then, fighting back tears, she recounts how her son got hooked on Oxy at 15 and died “cold and alone in a gas station parking lot”. Real stories from families of those who died after becoming addicted to Oxy will be used during each episode’s disclaimer segment.

The Gist: As we see a stressed-out, older Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick) try to figure out which of his 200 smoke detectors is chirping in his massive mansion, Edie Flowers (Uzo Aduba) is ushered into a law office in Washington, DC.

Flowers is impatient and dismissive as the lawyers who are deposing her talk to her about the class action suit they are putting together against Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the makers of OxyContin. She’s been there before; companies like Purdue get levied massive fines, which they pay and then move on. But when the attorneys show that Sackler has also been deposed, she changes her mind — as long as the chair Sackler sat in to give his deposition is removed from the conference room.

She goes back to the first time she heard of Oxy in 1998, as she investigated Medicaid billing fraud for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Roanoke, Virginia. A small-town doctor wasn’t just billing for x-rays he never gave, but it seemed like he was billing for a repeated number of prescriptions for a mysterious drug named OxyContin.

Flowers then tells the lawyers about Oxy came to be, going back to the story of Arthur Sackler, Jr. (Clark Gregg), a psychiatrist who learned that he can make more marketing new medicines than being a doctor, including drugs like Valium. After he died in the 1980s, his heirs scrambled for possession of his myriad money-losing companies, but his nephew Richard Sackler wanted Purdue. Citing that people’s lives were mostly concerned with running from pain and towards pleasure, he felt he could help in that area.

To that end, he proposed marrying the time-release coating of Purdue’s MS Contin, a morphine pill that had an expiring patent, with an even more powerful painkiller named oxycodone. After all, according to Sackler, morphine is associated with death, and he wanted to make an opiate associated “with improved well-being, with life.” OxyContin, “the drug you never knew you needed,” was the result.

In North Carolina, Glen Kryger (Taylor Kitsch), the owner of an auto repair shop, suffers a devastating back injury on the job, requiring surgery. His pain post-surgery is so debilitating that he can’t even get off the couch to go to the bathroom, and instead urinates in a bottle. The Valium he’s on isn’t doing the job, so his doctor prescribes him the newly-approved drug OxyContin.

We also see a sales recruitment event, where a very persuasive sales manager named Britt Hufford (Dina Shihabi) charges up a room full of hopefuls by saying that Oxy gives patients suffering pain some relief for the first time ever. Shannon Schaeffer (West Duchovny), a recent college grad, signs up to sell Oxy for Purdue, and Britt goes so far as to offer Shannon a room in her amazing apartment.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Painkiller covers essentially the same ground as Dopesick.

Our Take: While Painkiller works from different source material than Dopesick — creators Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster based it on two books about the opioid crisis and Peter Berg directed all the episodes — the story is essentially the same. It’s about how Sackler and Purdue Pharmaceuticals managed to get the country hooked on opioids, fomenting the crisis that still rips families apart today.

The tone of Painkiller is decidedly different, however, and not in a good way. Despite the heart-wrenching testimonials by real victims’ families that begin each episode, it almost feels like Fitzerman-Blue, Harpster and Berg are treating the players in the opioid crisis like quirky characters instead of people on either side of a real crisis.

Broderick plays Sackler like a strange little man with odd ideas of how his new drug will make people’s lives better, despite the warnings he gets about oxycodone’s addictive qualities. While Aduba is excellent as Flowers, her character has more of a curmudgeonly, over-it-all demeanor, whether it’s the version of her in the present or from 25 years ago.

We’re not sure what the storytelling format is going to be in the subsequent episodes. Will it still be via Flowers’ deposition or will we see others narrating the flashbacks? Will we get more of the perspective of an addict, like we figure Kitsch’s character Kryger will be?

The only thing that’s clear by the end of the first episode is that the tone of the show doesn’t seem to match the gravity of the story its telling. That’s especially telling during the segment where Shannon is recruited as a salesperson by Britt. Buffeted by the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” the scene feels so over the top, like Britt is leading a cult meeting, that it minimizes just what the impact of Purdue’s sales team had on convincing doctors to prescribe Oxy to their patients.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: As Iggy Pop’s “Candy” plays, Kryger desperately looks for an Oxy pill that fell under his stove while Britt and Candace down shots at a club.

Sleeper Star: Gregg is interestingly creepy as Arthur Sackler, especially when the elderly version of Arthur walks into an ER, announces that he’s having a heart attack and where the doctors should check for a blockage, and stays stoic as he passes away.

Most Pilot-y Line: Britt has Shannon smell her designer leather pumps, and when she asks Shannon what they smell like, Britt’s predictable response is that “they smell like money.”

Our Call: SKIP IT. It feels like Painkiller wants to say something profound bout how the opioid crisis was started, but does so in a way that feels completely tone-deaf.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.