Netflix took on Big Pharma in its own way with its newest original miniseries Painkiller. Starring Uzo Aduba, Matthew Broderick, and Taylor Kitsch, Painkiller tells the story of the Schedule II prescription drug OxyContin, the family behind the medication, a victim of the drug, a pharmaceutical rep selling it, and an attorney determined to take the manufacturer down. Though Painkiller has some glaring flaws, it makes the impact for which it was aiming.
Structured around attorney Edie Flowers (Aduba) telling the story of her involvement with the case against Purdue Pharma, the company responsible for OxyContin, Painkiller goes back to Purdue’s origins, depicting how Richard Slacker (Broderick), the mastermind behind the pill and its success, assumed his position at the pharmaceutical. Meanwhile, the series introduces us to Shannon Schaeffer (West Duchovny), a recent college graduate just starting her career as a salesman for Purdue. We also meet husband, father, and business owner Glen Kryger (Kitsch), and learn what event sets him on the path of addiction to OxyContin.
Odd at Times
The show keeps up with each of these stories, examining how each of them is related to both OxyContin and the opioid crisis at large. Through powerful performances from Broderick, Aduba, and Kitsch, we see the greed fueling the sale of the drug, the drive to bring those responsible to justice, and the horrible realities of an addiction to a medication marketed as safe pain management. Where Painkiller gets lost is in its subplots. The series is by no means hard to follow, but in trying to show the doctors’ involvement, Slacker’s psyche, the pharmaceutical employees’ eventual guilt (emotional, not legal), Flowers’s past, and fringe cases, the main storylines lose some of their punch.
Painkiller also took some strange creative choices, like displaying the lyrics to a song written for and performed at a Purdue Pharma conference as a sing-along using an OxyContin tablet as the cursor and the meta moment of Purdue’s lawyers stopping mid-scene to face the camera and identify themselves. Such choices, and others, could be explained as a symbol of the juxtaposition between the realities of the parties on either side of OxyContin, or perhaps as a humorous respite from the otherwise intense subject matter, but they instead come off as disjointed and silly.
Overall Impactful
Still, the flaws don’t totally detract from the powerful story being told, one that’s very, very real, as we’re reminded of at the beginning of each episode. Instead of telling viewers that this story is based on real events but dramatized in some ways (Edie, for example, is not a real person, but rather an amalgamation of a variety of attorneys involved in the case against Purdue Pharma), Painkiller has different family members of people who lost their life due to an addiction to OxyContin share the disclaimer and tell a snippet of their own story.
Several different choices could’ve made Painkiller better, like adding two to four more episodes to allow the writers to develop some of the subplots in greater detail or eliminating other aspects entirely. But the strong message of the series remains, and the nearly six hours of television is worth learning the story of the creation of the opioid crisis and seeing just how serious it is.
Painkiller is streaming now on Netflix.