'Painkiller' Is TV's Latest Dive Into the Opioid Crisis

The Sackler family took another hit with Netflix's Painkiller, a drama series that focuses on the effects of the opioid crisis in America. The six-episode limited series—which is directed by Friday Night Lights's Peter Berg, and stars Matthew Broderick as Richard Sackler—premiered on August 10.

Sackler was the chairman and President of Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical company that created OxyContin and helped push it onto the market. The story is based on a New Yorker article by Patrick Radden Keefe titled, "The Family That Build an Empire of Pain"—as well as the book, Barry Meier's Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic.

"So much of this show is the conviction of a group of people," executive producer Eric Newman told Entertainment Weekly. Uzo Aduba and Taylor Kitsch star in Painkiller, with the latter playing a car mechanic named Glen Kryger who becomes addicted to the drug after hurting his back on the job. It helps that Kitsch also had a very personal connection to the show, as well. Last year, the actor told Esquire that he "went to hell and back seventeen times" with someone close to him that struggled with addiction. Reading the script for the first time brought all those painful memories back. "Everything we had gone through was still right there," he said, adding that Painkiller was the "most fulfilling job I’ve ever done."

The Netflix series follows Dopesick, Hulu's 2021 docu-drama on the Sackler family and the opioid crisis—plus the streamer's own project, Narcos, another popular opioid drama starring Pedro Pascal. But Berg felt strongly about bringing this story back to television, telling Esquire in a new interview, “They were no different from street drug dealers,” referring to the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma. “They were just FDA approved.”

If you want a look at the series before watching, the Painkiller trailer features ominous family portraits of the Sacklers, an intense monologue from Broderick about making money off of people's pain, and many, many shots of the chaos and consequences of the opioid crisis. Elsewhere in the preview, Broderick delivers a haunting line about his intentions. "All of human behavior is essentially deprived of two things: run from pain, run toward pleasure," he says. "If we place ourselves right there between pain and pleasure, we'll never have to worry about money again." Uzo Abuda's Edie isdetermined to bring down the Sacklers' influence on the opioid crisis—and the stakes couldn't be higher. Watch the trailer below.

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