Why Peter Berg made a TV show about OxyContin

Friday Night Lights creator Peter Berg is back with Painkiller, a new limited drama series that presents a fictionalized account of the opioid crisis and the role of Purdue Pharma, the makers of the highly addictive narcotic pain medication OxyContin.

According to Netflix’s public ranking system, Painkiller is currently one of the streaming service’s most popular shows in the U.S. and Canada, which Berg thinks has something to do with the sheer number of lives that have been affected by opioid addiction.

“I was confident that our show would find an audience,” the director says in an interview with Q‘s Tom Power. “I was maybe a little surprised at how big of an audience it found so quickly.”

Based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker exposé “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” and the 2003 book Pain Killer by Barry Meier, Painkiller dramatizes Purdue Pharma’s reckless and deceptive marketing of OxyContin in the 1990s as safe, effective and non-addictive pain management.

While there are legitimate medical uses for OxyContin and other prescription opioids (for example, treating severe pain caused by cancer or chronic health issues), Purdue Pharma promoted OxyContin as a wonder drug for all kinds of pain, prioritizing corporate profit above public health.

[Richard Sackler] came up with a plan to take what is essentially heroin and put it into a little pill, and have doctors manipulate doctors into prescribing it.– Peter Berg

The show depicts multiple sides of the opioid epidemic — from the pawns used to push the drug, to the doctors who prescribed it, to the victims whose lives were devastated by addiction — but a substantial amount of screen time is devoted to exposing the Sackler family, the founders and owners of Purdue Pharma.

The most prominently featured real-life member of the Sackler family is Richard Sackler, played by Matthew Broderick, who was pivotal in developing OxyContin and securing approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

“The more I learned about this company, Purdue Pharma, and their leader, Richard Sackler, and how, basically, he came up with a plan to take what is essentially heroin and put it into a little pill, and have doctors manipulate doctors into prescribing it to a million-plus, two million, three million people — knowing how addictive it was and not caring as they just racked up so much money — angered me,” says Berg.

That anger was felt by nearly everyone who worked on Painkiller. “There wasn’t a day that went by where some member of the crew wouldn’t approach me … and tell me the story of their loved one who died of opioids,” he recalls.

WATCH | Official trailer for Painkiller:

Each episode of the six-part miniseries begins with a real person sharing their own personal story of loss due to an OxyContin addiction. The decision to include these emotional testimonials was born from a conversation Berg had with Netflix’s legal department informing him of the need for disclaimers.

“I don’t generally have a problem doing that,” he says. “It just kind of felt like in this case, to put a disclaimer up front, the standard disclaimer, was to let the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma off the hook a bit…. It just popped into my head, the idea of what if we start with a woman reading a disclaimer? She reads it as written, as legal says it must be, she then puts it down and says, ‘OK, but what is real?’

“There’s a real desire for anyone who’s been through something as horrific as losing a child to OxyContin … to fight back and to make sure as many people know who their child was, and what happened, and what role OxyContin had in that.”

The full interview with Peter Berg is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. He also talks about Friday Night Lights. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Peter Berg produced by Catherine Stockhausen.