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Painkiller
The One To Start With, The One To Stay With / Jesus Gave Me Water
Season 1
Episodes 1 and 2
Editor’s Rating
Photo: Netflix/KERI ANDERSON/NETFLIX
Over the last few years, we have had a bumper crop of shows about When Medicine Goes Bad, a subcategory of white-collar true crime. The Dropout, Dopesick, and now Painkiller are all tragedies about what happens when the big, theoretically helpful projects of entitled, rich white people have terrible, lasting unintended consequences. Series of this type have multiple purposes: to be popular art about societal issues, start conversations, and inform. They tend to be rewarded for the social good they aim to do: Michael Keaton won a SAG Award for his role in Dopesick, Amanda Seyfried snagged an Emmy for her compelling turn as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout, and even the execrable Hillbilly Elegy (which touches on the opioid crisis) was nominated for two Academy Awards.
Painkiller is adapted from a book by New York Times investigative reporter Barry Meier and a long-form New Yorker piece by Patrick Radden Keefe. Series creators Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster wrote all six episodes, which are all directed by Peter Berg.
The series takes its subject just as seriously as its forebears while garlanding most of the story with a fevered visual style that echoes the heady atmosphere of Purdue Pharma’s events for its sales team. The often-snarky montages, the jittery edits and jump cuts, the mugging for the camera, all suggest that everyone involved in creating, bringing to market, and popularizing OxyContin was not entirely connected to reality.
Each episode opens with a tight close-up on the face of a woman who diligently reads aloud the routine caveat that although Painkiller is based on real events and real people, details have been changed for narrative purposes. Each then draws a big breath and says, so directly to the camera it’s as if she’s staring into viewers’ eyes, what wasn’t made-up: the name and experiences of her child who died due to OxyContin addiction. There are only six episodes in this limited series, so we only learn about six of the people whose lives were stolen by the opioid epidemic, but these are the most compelling and haunting moments in the series. Episode one, “The One to Start With, the One to Stay With,” is introduced by Christopher Trejo’s mother, and episode two, “Jesus Gave Me Water,” by Cassy Chism’s mother.
Painkiller’s story consists of three main narrative threads: the swift, devastating emergence of the opioid crisis starting in 1998, the history of the Sackler family and scion Richard Sackler’s (Matthew Broderick) relentless push to bring OxyContin to market regardless of the potential public-health consequences, and the crushingly sad experiences of Glen Kryger, a patient who used OxyContin in good faith under the care of his physician and became addicted to it anyway. Woven into two of these threads are the experiences of Shannon Schaeffer (nepo baby West Duchovny), a naïve, brand-new sales rep for Purdue working under the tutelage of a seductive and cartoonishly awful mentor, Britt (Dina Shihabi, absolutely going for it in every scene).
The threads are held together and framed by Uzo Aduba’s first-rate narration. Aduba masterfully walks a hair’s-breadth-narrow line between righteous fury and battle weariness in her role as Edie Flowers, a former investigator for the Virginia U.S. Attorney’s office. Flown into D.C. to provide her eyewitness knowledge of how the opioid epidemic appeared to emerge fully formed in the late 1990s, Edie walks the attorneys for hundreds of clients through the history of the Sackler family, OxyContin, and Purdue Pharma.
Setting aside the belief-beggaring notion that a firm whose team has succeeded in compelling Richard Sackler to sit for a deposition (as one puts it, “We’re big-game hunting; no mid-level flunkies this time”) is in need of an Opioid Crisis 101 seminar, Aduba’s delivery of said seminar is stellar. Whether she’s narrating over her character’s memories of the dawn of the epidemic or over flashy little montages of the Sackler family and their business dealings, or just speaking directly to the lawyers across the table, she holds the whole chaotic kaleidoscope together.
Edie is prickly and thin on patience, but she’s also generous with her knowledge once it’s clear that it might actually make a difference in this suit. So, bound by her own ethics — “I made a promise to someone” to show up for things like this — and her bone-deep need to make people understand that the ongoing nightmare of the opioid epidemic could have been prevented or effectively mitigated at many steps along the way, she takes a deep breath, and off we go.
Edie learned about the opioid epidemic almost by accident in the course of an otherwise routine 1998 investigation of a Virginia doctor for overcharging Medicaid for X-rays he never performed. Reviewing his billing, she finds 1,098 prescriptions for a drug she’s never heard of over just the last few months. What the hell is OxyContin?
Visits to local pharmacies confirm the doctor’s assertion that these prescriptions are real and further reveal that OxyContin is both wildly popular and a serious problem. Pharmacists and doctors are dispensing what they believe to be a safe drug for moderate pain, but patients are already experiencing increased need and demanding higher doses. The scales fall from Edie’s eyes when she sees an addict get aggressive with a pharmacist, who then pepper-sprays the man, who in turn jumps behind the counter to get into the store of medications, hoping to find more Oxy. How has this drug flown so completely under her radar when addicts, pharmacists, doctors, and even the people in China who have been producing the cute little powder-blue OxyContin promotional stuffies know all about it?
Purdue Pharma’s enormous and laser-focused sales force is how. Here, we meet the ambitious but seemingly well-intended sales newbie Shannon Schaeffer at the dawn of her apprenticeship to super-successful sales rep Britt. Britt is everything Shannon could be if she wants it enough and can compartmentalize all aspects of human decency. She’s got the cavernously huge apartment, the expensive clothes, the fiery-red Porsche, the worldliness to be a fan of Champagne and subtle makeup, and more motivational-poster mottoes than you can shake a stick at.
Shortly after being wowed by Britt’s enthusiastic, cult-leader-style recruitment speech, Shannon leaps at the chance to crash at Britt’s apartment and, under her tutelage, is soon using her feminine wiles and observational skills to persuade skeptical doctors to consider prescribing OxyContin after all. OxyContin isn’t like the other opioids; she’s a cool opioid with minimal risk of addiction and the corresponding power to “give patients their lives back.”
Following her first early success — using her knowledge of high-school and collegiate athletics to bond with Dr. Cooper, who then accepts literature, coupons, and a business card — Shannon crosses paths with Edie, who notices their interaction from the waiting room. Taking one of Shannon’s cards, she immediately asks about Shannon’s sales strategy and how much she earns, then remarks that the coupons “were kind of a street-dealer move.” After an absurd moment where it looks like Britt might just run Edie over in the parking lot, Edie’s voice-over tartly summarizes the rise of the OxyContin Kittens as “a turning-point moment — sexy aliens driving through rural America, getting people hooked on their product.”
The history of that product unfolds with the inexorability of fate. Of course it was developed and unleashed by the Sackler family. Arthur Sackler was a genius for creating markets for long-term use of medications such as Thorazine and Valium, effectively writing the playbook for the release of OxyContin. Of course it falls to laser-focused, Arthur-worshiping Richard to figure out how to take charge of and appease his squabbling, money-hungry extended family (whose boardroom antics dully echo Succession). Perhaps less inevitable is the ghost of Arthur Sackler (Clark Gregg) visiting and guiding Richard every step of the way, but he does.
The best-case scenario of OxyContin’s intended use would seem to be Glen Kryger (Taylor Kitsch), a hardworking family man who uses it diligently following a terrible back injury sustained at work. He’s the definition of a “good” victim, someone who plays by the rules and has no prior history of painkiller addiction. Glen only seeks out pain relief stronger than Vicodin because his pain merits it, and he needs to get back to work at his garage. At first, everything is fine; Glen takes his doses on the schedule his doctor provides and feels that Oxy has given him his life back. Work! Sex! Being a good dad! All are once more within his grasp! But then he freaks out when he’s unable to find his bottle of meds (because his stepson Ty had neglected to put it back after swiping some pills for his friends). And then, taking a bite from his sandwich at Cracker Barrel, he unintentionally bites his hand so badly that he bleeds all over his sandwich and plate, and then passes out beside his family’s table. We know where this is heading.
• This series has some pricey needle drops: “The Sound of Silence,” “Sabotage,” and “Psycho Killer” so far.
• Richard Sackler lives in an enormous, empty (but for him and the staff), entirely black-and-white mansion. Britt’s enormous, boringly schmancy apartment is the OxyContin Kitten mansion equivalent.
• I can’t stop thinking about Christopher Trejo’s and Cassy Chism’s moms. The fragile, brave faces they manage to summon at the end of their reminiscences about their late children are some of the most haunting images I’ve ever seen on film.
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