THE MAKING OF A GATEWAY DRUG TO HELL
Dopesick
NETWORK Hulu AIR DATE October 13th
★★★☆☆
The sTory of our national opioid epidemic — and the role the family-run Purdue Pharma company, maker of OxyContin, played in it — at times feels too sprawling to be contained within an eight-hour miniseries, at others too familiar to fill all of those episodes. Danny Strong’s adaptation of
Beth Macy’s investigative bestseller bounces among multiple timelines, covering two separate government investigations into Purdue’s role as a de facto cartel and the frayed bureaucracies that allowed Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbarg) to market Oxy as nonaddictive. It also follows Michael Keaton and Kaitlyn Dever as composite characters — he’s a country doctor, she’s a young coal miner
— at ground zero of the crisis. The structure can be needlessly confusing, and
both Strong and Stuhlbarg leave Sackler a villainous cipher. But Keaton and Dever are excellent, and the scenes where a pair of federal prosecutors (Peter Sarsgaard and John Hoogenakker) slowly figure out how Purdue was granted unchecked power are satisfying in the way that tales of dogged investigators always are. An uneven project, but an often chilling one.