The Sackler segment is the most infuriating because it’s the one with the most tantalizing potential. Through five episodes sent to critics, the storytelling layers intersect only in limited ways and vary wildly in quality. With no interest in linearity, continuity or consistency, there are only rare instances in which the history-in-a-blender perspective proves satisfying rather than merely elongating the narrative. These moments are the parts of Dopesick that feel like you’re reading a book - uncinematic but lucid - rather than watching a television show that stretches incoherently across several states and two decades. In its best moments, Dopesick does a good job of following the money in a trickle-down manner, implicating sales, marketing and corporate leaders, and sometimes unscrupulous doctors, in creating a drug, fabricating the conditions and terminology for which it becomes the only cure, and then manipulating the establishment through loopholes, indirect payoffs and all manner of grift. It’s a tough structure to translate to the screen. attorneys played by Sarsgaard, John Hoogenakker and Jake McDorman, plus a dogged DEA agent played by Rosario Dawson, to fight the capitalist system and the government bureaucracy insulating Purdue, the Sacklers and their ilk. Those doctors, initially targeted in a few Rust Belt and industrialized states, then push the drugs on blue-collar workers, embodied by coal miner’s daughter Betsy ( Kaitlyn Dever).įinally, after Oxy saturates struggling communities and sparks waves of addiction and crime, it’s left to law enforcement figures, including U.S. Sackler’s message percolates down to salespeople, embodied by Will Poulter‘s Billy and Phillipa Soo’s Amber, who are armed with misinformation and blatant lies to pitch to doctors, like Keaton’s Samuel Finnix, on Ox圜ontin’s seemingly magical lack of addictive properties. If that dream brings him billions and helps him laugh in the face of condescending relatives, all the better. ![]() ![]() It all starts with the Sackler family, particularly Richard Sackler (Stuhlbarg), who funnels a gnawing inferiority complex into a superficially altruistic dream of conquering pain with a miracle drug known as Ox圜ontin. ![]() The drama also features Looming Tower co-stars Michael Stuhlbarg and Peter Sarsgaard - and probably the only reason Jeff Daniels doesn’t appear here is that he was doing his own tepid, opiate-crisis-tinged miniseries, Showtime’s American Rust.įollowing Macy’s book, Dopesick offers a stratified look at the floundering front in America’s drug war, interweaving real-life and fictional characters. Like The Looming Tower, Dopesick comes across as Hulu’s attempt to do a mid-’00s HBO miniseries, this time going so far as to recruit HBO good-luck charms Danny Strong ( Recount) and Barry Levinson ( Paterno) to write and direct, respectively, this adaptation of Beth Macy’s Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America. ![]() Cast: Michael Keaton, Peter Sarsgaard, Michael Stuhlbarg, Will Poulter, John Hoogenakker, Kaitlyn Dever and Rosario DawsonĬreator: Danny Strong, from the book by Beth Macy
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