Why Netflix's 'Painkiller' Has Such a Devastating Opening

Netflix's new drama about America's opioid crisis, Painkiller, opens each episode with a devastating message.

The six-part limited series chronicles the rise of OxyContin in the 1990s and its impact on families around the country.

Starring Uzo Aduba, Matthew Broderick, and Taylor Kitsch, Painkiller presents a fictionalized version of how the opioid crisis became so pervasive, painting a picture of the real life people involved, including the Sackler family, as well as exploring the impact the drug had on ordinary Americans.

Executive producer Eric Newman explained to Newsweek that the producers were obligated to put a disclaimer at the start of the show, making it clear that although it is a work of fiction, it is based on real events.

"At the beginning of any television show, particularly one that has elements of nonfiction, when you're chronicling someone about whom you can't know everything, you can't know what they said in private, certainly not what's in their head, you're bound legally to do some type of disclaimer, and we really struggled with that," Newman told Newsweek, noting that they did not want to appear to absolve the Big Pharma executives responsible for contributing to the crisis.

"[Director] Pete Berg and I particularly had a lot of conversations with Netflix about how do we get around this. Because what we're doing here is basically letting them off the hook right off the bat," Newman said.

"We're basically saying, 'Don't take this too seriously.' And to mitigate that, we came up with an idea that Netflix very gladly supported, which was getting, in this case, the parents of young people who died from OxyContin to read them."

The voices of the parents are "incredibly effective," according to Newman.

"I would say in my many years of doing this, the hardest thing to do [was] to go into these homes and sit with these parents who are just lovely people who did nothing wrong but follow a doctor's orders. Every story was similar in that regard," he told Newsweek.

"What was so inspiring about them was they all see it as their work in the world to share this story, to warn people and provide them with the information that they didn't get many years ago when a doctor prescribed OxyContin for a back injury, a broken leg or wisdom teeth or whatever it was."

Newman said the voices of the parents reading the disclaimer "became very much the heart of the show."

"We're very proud of it and it's very effective. And I'm glad that I had the experience that I had of meeting these people. It makes what we're doing even more worthwhile."

The show is based on author Patrick Radden Keefe's New Yorker article "The Family That Built an Empire of Pain" and Barry Meier's book Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic.

OxyContin became a popular painkiller that was pushed and distributed by Purdue Pharma in the late 1990s. The company was able to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the opioid by providing misleading information about the drug, claiming it was less addictive than other opioids.

Former Purdue chairman Richard Sackler even encouraged company executives to claim that OxyContin was only a problem for "criminal" addicts and that the crisis sweeping the nation had nothing to do with the drug itself.

An estimated 1.2 million people are expected to die by the end of the decade in the U.S. and Canada unless urgent intervention takes place, according to 2022 research by the Stanford-Lancet Commission.

The Sackler family has been ordered by courts around the country to pay billions in compensation to victims and their families.

Painkiller is out now on Netflix.