Painkiller (Netflix): A Miniseries Review - An Uncomfortably Dumb Take on the Opioid Holocaust

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This miserable mess of a miniseries is so abysmal it dishonors the actual victims of the opioid epidemic.

Like many people, the opioid epidemic, which has ravaged this country for the last quarter of a century, has had a direct and profound impact upon my life. The particulars of my situation are personal, so I won’t share them here, but just know that the topic of the 21st century’s plague of opioid addiction is one which holds great importance to me and of which I know a great deal. So, when Painkiller, the new six-episode Netflix miniseries debuted on the streaming service on August 10th, I was very interested.  

The series, based upon the nonfiction book Painkiller: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic by Barry Meier as well as an article in The New Yorker by Patrick Radden Keefe titled “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain”, dramatizes the story of the deplorable Sackler family - owners of Purdue Pharma, and the powerful drug they developed and deceptively marketed, Oxycontin, an opioid equivalent to heroin which sparked an epidemic of addiction across America that has killed over a million people and devastated the lives of at least five times that.

I’ve read both Meier’s book and Keefe’s article, as well as all of the other relevant gospels about the opioid epidemic, like Dopesick by Beth Macy and American Overdose by Chris McGreal (as well as Dreamland by Sam Quinones about the heroin trade). I found all of the books to be indispensable in trying to understand the magnitude of the evil unleashed by the Sacklers and the insidious and insipid corruption endemic in America. (I recommend them all but if I had to list them I’d say 1. Dopesick 2. Painkiller 3. American Overdose…I’d also say that Dreamland is absolutely, without question, essential reading not just on the topic of opioids but in general.)

The Sackler family pharma empire was started by Arthur Sackler who in the 1950’s turned medicine into a marketing and sales business. In the 1960’s Arthur came up with brilliant marketing plan for Valium and masterfully inflicted mother’s little helper onto an unsuspecting public. Thirty years later his nephew Richard would do the same with Oxycontin, which unleashed an opioid apocalypse upon America.

The scope and scale of the Sackler family’s diabolical nature is difficult to grasp as normal human beings simply cannot even begin to comprehend the rapacious evil of malicious and malignant mega-sociopaths. But normal people can grasp the consequences of the Sackler family’s inherent evil because they were the ones who suffered under it. For the last twenty-five years no one has been safe from Oxycontin’s spread. Rich, poor, urban, rural, it didn’t matter. Everyone knew someone who was devastated by the opioid epidemic that went across this country like a blitzkrieg.

Some areas were originally harder hit than others. Western Virginia for instance, was initially targeted by the Sackler machine because it had high rates of disability claims, which in the Sackler’s eyes meant high need for opiates and addicts-in-waiting. If you look at a map and draw a circle around Western Virginia which encompasses South-Western West Virginia, Southern Ohio and Eastern Kentucky, the release of Oxycontin and its accompanying marketing campaign was the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb being dropped at its epicenter. In its wake, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, died and families and communities were destroyed. I read one statistic that left me shocked which said that in some of the counties in this area 75% of children in schools were being raised by someone other than their birth parents because of the opioid epidemic. The magnitude of this catastrophe is nearly impossible to comprehend.

Of course, rural Virgina, West Virginia, Southern Ohio and Eastern Kentucky weren’t the only places the be obliterated the by Sackler’s scorched-earth Oxycontin campaign, as it was nationwide. And it should come as no surprise to anyone with a brain between their ears that in corruption riddled-America it was operatives and bureaucrats from both political parties that pushed Oxycontin through the FDA approval process and then exerted influence to make sure that the Sacklers got off scot-free for their crimes. Corruption makes for strange bedfellows as people like the Democrat douchebags like Saint James Comey and Clinton lackey Mary Jo White, as well as Republican uber-scumbag supreme Rudy Giuliani all played big parts in covering the Sackler’s asses.

But enough of what actually happened during the Oxycontin-fueled, Sackler-family-instigated opioid crisis, let’s get to Painkiller which attempts to dramatize these events.

Unfortunately, Painkiller, which is created by Micah Fitzeman-Blue and Noah Harpster, and directed by Peter Berg, is absolutely atrocious, an utterly abysmal affair, so much so that it does a tremendous disservice to the victims, living and dead, of the Sackler slaughter.

The series attempts to tell a vast story by using four narratives that are meant to tie together. There’s the story of Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick), president of Purdue Pharma and driving force of the Oxycontin express. Then there’s Edie Flowers (Uzo Uduba) – an assistant U.S. attorney, who is sort of a narrator to events. There’s also new Purdue Pharma Oxycontin saleswoman Shannon Schaeffer (West Duchovny) as well as the story of working-class addict Glen Kryger (Taylor Kitsch).

The biggest problems with Painkiller are the uneven tone, the atrocious casting and equally awful acting.

Let’s start with the tone. Each episode starts with real parents of people who have died from opioid overdose, and their stories, as brief as they are, are absolutely heartbreaking. You can feel the profound depth of their pain just by hearing them speak a few words, or in their inability to speak a few words. Seeing the genuine and devastating pain of these parents and then contrasting it with the phony baloney, tone deaf bullshit which follows in the dramatization of the epidemic which killed their children, feels very uncomfortable if not outright disrespectful.

For example, the Richard Sackler storyline is so ridiculous as to be absurd. Richard is haunted by the ghost of his evil uncle Arthur, and has conversations with him. Yes, that’s not a misprint, this actually happens throughout the series. Richard lives in a pseudo fantasy world which borders on the slapstick. It is impossible to take this garbage seriously, especially when it is preceded by real people struggling to keep their shit together as they briefly recount the hell that is the loss of a child.

Then there’s the grounded story of Glen Kryger, who struggles with addiction to Oxycontin. The tone of this is more serious, and it feels like the rest of the series should follow suit, but none of it does.

Jumping from Richard Sackler’s fantasy life to Kryger’s reality hell to the odd capitalism porn of saleswoman Shannon Schaeffer’s life and then to the entirely extraneous (and fictional because the character is made up) history of Edie Flowers is enough to cause whiplash and induce vomiting.

As for the acting, let’s start with Matthew Broderick. Broderick as Richard Sackler is an embarrassment. Fat Ferris fakes his way through the role and never even remotely touches the ground. He hams his way through scene after scene with the vitality of mule on barbiturates and the charisma of cadaver in the hot sun. Equally awful is the seemingly always awful Clark Gregg, who plays the ghost of Sackler sparked epidemic past in the form of Richard’s uncle Arthur Sackler, the guy who started the whole Sackler shit sandwich from which we have to take a bite.

Both Broderick and Gregg are embarrassingly bad in their roles, and they aren’t helped by Peter Berg’s asinine direction.

Peter Berg is, at his very best, a third-rate directing talent, but at his core he is a visionless, talentless, hack. His direction on this series is no less than disgraceful. The uneven tone, which varies widely between gritty realism and absurdist fantasy, is so poorly executed as to be offensive to anyone who has suffered as a result of the Sackler scourge.

Berg’s incompetence, ineptitude and inability to make anything dramatically coherent should come as no surprise considering his horseshit filmography, but considering the stakes involved with Painkiller, it is still a major disappointment.

As for the rest of the cast, Uzo Aduba, who has somehow won three Emmys, is an absolute mystery to me. Never has an actress so devoid of talent, skill and charisma been so overly praised and honored. Adding to the entire issue with the series, Uduba’s character Edie Flowers is totally made up. I would assume the producers felt they needed a woman of color to bring the black girl magic to the opioid epidemic (they needed a heroine to fight heroin!) and to sassily stand up to all those evil white men who made it happen. Of course, that isn’t what happened in real life…and shoehorning diversity and inclusion into a story about an epidemic that killed vastly more white people than black, feels pretty disgusting to me (btw…. The Hulu miniseries Dopesick did the same thing, no doubt for the same reason, creating Rosario Dawson’s DEA agent character out of thin air just to appease the diversity gods. God help us all), as does trying to shoehorn the crack epidemic and race into the story, and then somehow attempting to give a black crack dealer absolution for their sins. Could it be that the black crack dealer and Richard Sackler are both vile animals worthy of violence upon them? Or is that too complex for simpleton twats like Peter Berg and company?

Ultimately, Aduba is an egregious bore and a grievous burden to the story. We don’t need her character and we certainly don’t need her and her aggressively amateurish acting which feels like a petulant child pouting and preening in order to get more ice cream.

Dina Shahabi plays Britt, a morally and ethically compromised Oxycontin super saleswoman who is absolutely wild about capitalism…and she is maybe the worst actress I’ve seen in a major film or tv project in the last decade…which is saying a lot. Shahabi is so transparently dreadful and in over her head as to be painful. If I saw a child in a middle school play act this badly, I would not only demand their drama teacher be fired but also physically assault them (the teacher not the child!)  for their crimes against the art of drama.

West Duchovny, daughter of David Duchovny and Tea Leoni and this week’s winner of the Hollywood Nepotism Award, is a pretty blonde who plays Shannon Schaeffer, Britt’s pretty blonde protégé/salesgirl. Duchovny is considerably better than Shahabi, but that doesn’t mean she’s particularly good….because she isn’t.

On the bright side, Taylor Kitsch is a good actor and he does superb work as Glen, a forty-something mechanic who gets hurt and goes down the Oxy rabbit hole to hell. Kitsch has always been a good actor, but the fact that he’s able to rise above the shit swamp that is Painkiller and acquit himself so well where others fail so miserably, speaks to his talent and skill.

Carolina Bartczak, who plays Lily, Glen’s wife, also brings a refreshing bit of realism to her role and does some solid work as well.

As much as I like Kitsch and Bartczak and found the Kryger family storyline to be the most compelling, I also found it to be an inadequate representation of the horrors of the opioid holocaust. Glen Kryger is no one’s child. We never meet his parents. We never get to know any younger people ravaged by the Sackler scourge, which I think is a missed opportunity as it would’ve been even more impactful.

As previously mentioned, Dopesick, based upon the Beth Macy book of the same name, was a Hulu miniseries that premiered in October of 2021. It covers the same exact ground as Painkiller but is much more thorough, accurate and effective. I thought Dopesick was very flawed but worth watching for Michael Keaton’s absolutely stunning performance. As flawed as it was, Dopesick looks like The Godfather and Citizen Kane combined when compared to Painkiller.

The bottom line is that the story of the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic is vitally important and to have this terrible tale told in such a frivolous, flippant and glib way is, frankly, blasphemous if not criminal.

Peter Berg, Matthew Broderick and the rest of the sorry sons of bitches who made Painkiller should be ashamed of themselves for trying to exploit the devastation of real people, and for doing so in such a shoddy and shitty manner.

I wholly encourage you to skip Painkiller the series and instead go read the book Painkiller, as well as Dopesick, Dreamland, and American Overdose. It is absolutely vital that people understand what happened with the Sacklers, the corruption in modern America, and the intimate horrors of the opioid epidemic. The scope and scale of this story is vast but reading these books will help you understand, in gruesome, minute detail, the world we live in and the evil and vile people running it, and how the powers that be see us regular folks as nothing more than disposable cannon fodder for their misery-inducing, money making machines.

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