MOVIE NEWS – Painkiller will premiere on Netflix in August, starring Matthew Broderick and Uzo Aduba.
Netflix has released the official trailer for the new series Painkiller. The series, starring Matthew Broderick and Uzo Aduba, is inspired by the real-life opioid crisis that has plagued America in recent years. The limited series will premiere on Netflix on Thursday, August 10, 2023. For a sneak peek, check out the brand-new trailer at the end of this article.
According to the synopsis, Painkiller is a fictional retelling of events that “explores some of the origins and aftermath of the opioid crisis in America, highlighting the stories of the perpetrators, victims, and truth-seekers whose lives are forever altered by the invention of OxyContin. [It is an] examination of crime, accountability, and the systems that have repeatedly failed hundreds of thousands of Americans.”
Painkiller is based on Barry Meier’s book Pain Killer and Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker Magazine article “The Family That Built the Empire of Pain”.
The limited series is directed by Pete Berg and produced by showrunners and writers Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster. Berg, Fitzerman-Blue and Harpster are also executive producing along with Eric Newman and Alex Gibney.
The series will have a strong cast. Broderick and Aduba are joined by Taylor Kitsch, Dina Shihabi, West Duchovny and John Rothman. Guest stars include Clark Gregg, Jack Mulhern, Sam Anderson, Ana Cruz Kayne, Brian Markinson, Noah Harpster, John Ales, Johnny Sneed, Tyler Ritter and Carolina Bartczak.
Painkiller offers a script about the opioid epidemic
“Everyone knows that the opioid crisis is bad,” Berg says of the series, via Netflix’s TUDUM. “But this is the origin story of the collision between medicine and money that allowed it to happen. One of the many things that I thought was missing [from the conversation about OxyContin] was the introduction of the drug into mainstream medicine. How Arthur Sackler, this psychiatrist from New York who specialized in lobotomies, started to realize that the future was in pills – specifically in advertising pills. Whoever could market their drug better was going to make the most money.”
Emphasizing how serious the subject matter is despite some comedic moments in the series, Berg added: “We wanted to make sure people knew upfront that there might be some farcical moments in this show, but that we don’t think there’s anything remotely funny about the Sackler family, Purdue and the opioid crisis.”
Executive producer Eric Newman also explained how timely the series is, given that the epidemic is still ongoing.
Newman doesn’t predict that it will end anytime soon, noting that it’s a story that’s “so big and so awful that it deserves to be told as often and as loudly as it can be.”
