The Big Picture
Painkiller incorporates real families who have lost loved ones to the opioid epidemic, adding a crucial emotional tie to the real world and setting the expectation that the series is a painful watch. The scale of devastation caused by Purdue Pharma’s actions was profound, with countless families affected by addiction and death. Berg was in awe of the number of victims who came forward to share their stories during the production of the series. The lingering grief and anger against pharmaceutical companies, particularly Purdue Pharma, is palpable. The families involved in Painkiller wanted to speak out and tell their stories as a way to express their real anger towards the responsible parties.
From the moment Painkiller starts, Peter Berg and the team behind the new Netflix miniseries want viewers to know the gravity of the story they’re about to tell. Each episode opens with a disclaimer from a real family who lost someone to the opioid epidemic, highlighting the horrific consequences of Purdue Pharma and its much-maligned former President and board chair Richard Sackler’s actions. The series is a semi-fictionalized account of their attempts to balance pleasure and pain for monetary gain by releasing the highly-addictive drug OxyContin and shattering families in the process. In a recent interview with Collider’s Christina Radish, Berg expressed how incorporating real victims was crucial to keeping the drama from overshadowing the very real devastation of the opioid epidemic.
Painkiller, like Dopesick before it, aims to entertain while also highlighting its heartbreaking subject matter in a meaningful way. That means taking a few liberties with the story of Sackler and the characters in his orbit, from the victims and those trying to bring down his empire built on a lie, all in the name of getting audiences invested. Matthew Broderick’s Sackler, for example, is a corporate ghoul haunted by his uncle’s ghost while Uzo Aduba acts as an amalgamation of all the real investigators hounding Purdue Pharma, and Taylor Kitsch plays a fictionalized victim whose life and family are torn apart by opioids after he suffered a back injury.
Given those creative decisions, Berg feared that the truth could be misconstrued, especially with a disclaimer at the front of each episode saying that not everything depicted was entirely true. Bringing in real families was the emotional tie to the real world the show needed in his eyes, setting the expectation that Painkiller is a painful watch, even if some elements were made to entertain:
“I thought it was important to set the tone. I also felt that, legally, we had to present a disclaimer at the front of each episode that not everything is real. A lot of it’s real, but not everything. The idea of starting this with a disclaimer would, for me, let Purdue Pharma a little bit off the hook because people would be like, ‘Well, I don’t know what’s real and what’s not real.’ I feel like that’s what always happens with the disclaimer. And so, I thought, what if we could get parents whose children had died to read the disclaimer and then say, ‘Maybe there are some things in the show you’re about to see that aren’t exactly real. But what is real is the fact that my child died because of OxyContin.’ I thought that would be a very effective way of getting the disclaimer out there and reinforcing the idea for the audience that maybe there are gonna be some entertaining aspects of what they’re about to watch, but this is not something to be taken lightly.”
Image via Netflix
Berg Was in Awe of All the Victims Ready to Come Forward for Painkiller
One thing Painkiller and other opioid epidemic series want to hammer home is how widespread the damage that Purdue Pharma caused is. OxyContin was billed as a miracle treatment for pain, and doctors were quick to administer it when the benefits were clear, wreaking havoc as hundreds of thousands of Americans became addicted and died. There’s a reason this is considered one of the greatest betrayals of public trust in history.
Berg, however, saw the scale of the devastation firsthand. “One of the things that was really profound for all of us was that, when we came up with the idea to do it, we were in Los Angeles editing, so we put out a call in the Los Angeles area,” he revealed. “It was for a very small area, just the West Side of L.A. in the southern L.A. area because that was the closest to where we could film. And within 10 hours one day, we had 80 families saying that they had lost children and they wanted to come talk.” Being confronted directly with the gravity of the situation and all the personal stories of loss made it all the more important in the team’s eyes that this reality be brought to life. “That was mindblowing,” Berg added. “That was just in one area of Los Angeles.” Reflecting on some of his past experiences, he expressed how much lingering grief and anger there is for the pharmaceutical companies responsible for ripping these families apart:
“I’ve done a lot of unscripted work, and I’ve worked with family members who’ve gone through tragedies that were different than the opioid crisis, but still tragedies and I suspected that these family members would want to have their moment to tell even a moment of their child’s story. I wasn’t surprised at the pain that we experienced with all the families, and the grieving, which is still very much ongoing, and the anger. There’s real anger against these pharmaceutical companies and against Purdue Pharma, in particular, so they wanted to talk.”
Painkiller was created by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker article “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” and Barry Meier’s novel Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic. The rest of the cast includes Dina Shihabi, West Duchovny, and John Rothman.
All episodes are available to watch now on Netflix. Check out the trailer below and keep an eye out for our full interview with Berg here at Collider.
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