Michael Keaton stars in a corrosive view of America’s opioid crisis

Dopesick ★★★★

In 1986, Richard Sackler speaks to the elders of Purdue Pharma, the company owned by his family, about the epidemic of pain afflicting America. His speech begins with the appearance of concern for sufferers, but quickly it becomes clear that what he’s really talking about is the opportunity for the company to capitalise on Americans’ pain with a new drug. So begins the award-winning series Dopesick, and it kicks things off in an appropriately chilling manner. From here the action will go back and forth in time, and across numerous locations, to follow the development, progress and consequences of the US opioid epidemic.

Michael Keaton is phenomenal as the small-town doctor who prescribes his patients to take the addictive Oxycontin in Dopesick.Credit: Gene Page/Hulu via AP

The show is rooted in three stories: Purdue’s machinations in producing and marketing the drug Oxycontin; the work of doctor Samuel Finnix (Michael Keaton), who is convinced by that marketing to prescribe Oxycontin for his patients in a Virginia mining town, with catastrophic effects; and the prosecutors led by Rick Mountcastle (Peter Sarsgaard) who later pursue the company for their abuses in promoting their drug as “non-addictive”, a claim they knew was false.

Dopesick is an uneasy watch, showcasing all that is worst of America and the modern world: the misery of the poor and the rapacious amorality of the rich. Of course, it also has heroes: courageous truth-tellers and crusading lawyers who fight to expose and redress the wrongs of the past.

But their heroism came only after colossal damage had been done, and indeed continues, the opioid epidemic is by no means finished, and the fact the Sackler family was eventually held to account could not put the genie back in the bottle.

That’s a big part of the show’s gut-wrenching impact: the knowledge that in the true story behind the screen, there can be no happy ending; just a slow, indefinite grind towards hopefully making things a little better bit by bit.

Of course, when a TV show latches onto a true story with the seeming aim of not just taking advantage of a good story, but of bringing injustice to light, there is always an awkward question of balance. If you’re making a real-life drama, you need real-life people, your main characters need to come fully to life. But at the same time, when dealing in the kind of big important issues that Dopesick does, sprinkling in details of characters’ personal lives can feel like trivial distraction. The show occasionally stumbles onto the wrong side of this line, and sometimes the effort to make us care about the victims by spending time on their domestic travails instead puts the brake on the story.

That’s a pretty minor quibble, though, for a show that for the vast majority of the time gets the task of telling a story with multiple strands, in multiple time periods, spot-on. In particular it is carried by a series of quite brilliant performances.

Keaton, rarely seen on the small screen, is predictably phenomenal as the small-town doctor, conveying both his deep care for his community and the guilt that consumes him when he realises he’s been complicit in the destruction of his own patients. Sarsgaard is also excellent as Mountcastle, the real-life prosecutor in tireless pursuit of the corporate criminals.

Michael Stuhlbarg as Richard Sackler in Dopesick

There are great turns from Rosario Dawson as a DEA agent disillusioned by the corruption that frustrates her attempts to do her job and allows opioid addiction to run rampant, and Will Poulter as a sickeningly enthusiastic-turned-doubtful Oxycontin salesman.

But perhaps the best performance of all is that of Michael Stuhlbarg, who is mesmerising as Richard Sackler, pushing the rest of the company to go all-in on Oxycontin with a near-Messianic zeal. Sackler believes himself to be the saviour of both his family’s company and the American people, pronouncing himself the man to heal everyone’s pain, to change the world through the magic of pharmaceuticals.

Stuhlbarg brings a cold stillness to Sackler that is terrifying in its encapsulation of a man bringing the savage ruthlessness of a military dictator to his quest to conquer the world with a drug.

By turns a saga of corporate brutality, a legal thriller, and a portrait of the way money and power crushes ordinary people beneath their heels, Dopesick is superbly-made, but profoundly sad, television.

Dopesick is on SBS On Demand.

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