#‘Painkiller’ Trailer Sees Uzo Aduba Taking on Purdue Pharma in Opioid Crisis Series

Painkiller, Netflix’s anticipated and upcoming new limited series about the U.S. opioid crisis, has dropped its first trailer.

The six-episode series releasing Aug. 10 from the EP team of Eric Newman (Narcos, True Story) and director Pete Berg (Friday Night Lights, Spenser Confidential) is inspired by real events amid the country’s opioid crisis and features a cast including Uzo Aduba, Matthew Broderick, Taylor Kitsch (marking a FNL reunion with Berg), Dina Shihabi, West Duchovny and John Rothman.

Alex Gibney (The Crime of the Century, Going Clear) also executive produces with creators, showrunners and writers Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood).

The trailer introduces Aduba’s character as Edie, the investigator leading the case against Purdue Pharma, with Broderick playing Richard Sackler, a scion of the billionaire family that controls Purdue and a senior executive at the company.

Richard explains that human behavior is comprised of how people “run from pain, run toward pleasure… if we place ourselves right there, between pain and pleasure, we will never have to worry about money again.” The Sackler family dynasty is eventually cemented when OxyContin becomes the No. 1 opioid in the country. Later in the trailer, Edie asks, “How can something legally prescribed be killing so many people? … It doesn’t just kill people. It destroys the families and friends. They are doing the exact same thing as every crack dealer in America, except they are getting rewarded for it.”

The limited series, described as an examination of crime, accountability and the systems that have repeatedly failed hundreds of thousands of Americans, is based on the book Pain Killer by Barry Meier and the New Yorker Magazine article about the Sackler dynasty “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” by Patrick Radden Keefe.

The logline reads: “A fictionalized telling of events, Painkiller explores some of the origins and aftermath of the opioid crisis in America, highlighting the stories of perpetrators, victims and truth-seekers whose lives are forever altered by the invention of OxyContin.”

In conversation with Netflix’s Tudum, Newman, who tackled the ongoing drug war with the streamer’s hit global series Narcos and Narcos: Mexico and who has an overall deal with Netflix, explained of the opioid epidemic captured in Painkiller, “The story is still going on. It’s playing out in real time, and I imagine that it will continue to play out long after us. 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.”

Each episode begins with a testimonial from a family member who has lost a child to the opioid epidemic and while there are some farcical moments and fictionalized characters (Aduba and Kitsch’s characters as composites of countless real Americans affected by the opioid epidemic), the series has a specifically set tone: “We wanted to mirror the effects of opioids: the warmth and the hope and the relief of taking a pill that’s going to deliver you from your suffering and then watching it become suffering,” says Newman.

The series tackles what Berg says is missing from the national conversation: the introduction of the drug into mainstream medicine. “Everyone knows that the opioid crisis is bad,” he says. “But this is the origin story of the collision between medicine and money that allowed it to happen. How [eldest brother] 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.”

Clark Gregg, Jack Mulhern, Sam Anderson, Ana Cruz Kayne, Brian Markinson, Noah Harpster, John Ales, Johnny Sneed, Tyler Ritter and Carolina Bartczak guest star.