Matthew Broderick's cartoonish spin on Sackler ignores the gravity of the opioid crisis

The story of the Sackler dynasty and the opioid epidemic unleashed upon America by their “wonder-drug” OxyContin has already been told in Disney+ drama Dopesick. That series played it straight by matter-of-factly outlining the case against the family and their driving force Richard Sackler, portrayed by Michael Stuhlbarg as a drab agent of death.

Eighteen months later, Netflix’s take on OxyContin needs to bring a fresh perspective. It does so by re-imagining tragedy as gonzo farce. Painkiller lands between the bug-eyed The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short – but where those tales already had an element of absurdity, with Painkiller, director Peter Berg (Battleship, Hancock) introduces a slapstick note absent from the real opioid crisis.

Worse yet, he tries to have it both ways. Each of the six episodes opens with the family member of a loved one lost to OxyContin – essentially with an effect like heroin in pill-popping form – holding a picture of the victim. They tell us that, while much of what we are about to see has been fictionalised, the underlying scandal is all too true.

But it’s hard to reconcile that tone with the flippancy with which Painkiller chronicles the rise and fall of the Sacklers and their company Purdue. Matthew Broderick spoofs patriarch Richard as a cartoonish weirdo. He’s a weaponised Walter Mitty, stalked by the ghost of his uncle, Arthur Sackler Sr (Clark Gregg), a marketing genius whose lasting contribution to humankind was to make Valium a household name. Now long dead, he haunts his nephew. At one point, they even get into a fistfight.

Painkiller is framed as a testimony by Edie Flowers, a prosecutor who led the fight against Purdue. Flowers is fictional – unlike the equivalent character in Dopesick, Rick Mountcastle (Peter Sarsgaard). She is played with impressive forthrightness by Orange Is the New Black’s Uzo Aduba. The writers furnish her with an emotive backstory as the daughter of a mother lost to the Washington DC crack epidemic. But her restraint jars with Broderick, who gives us Richard as a demonic Willy Wonka. Painkiller can’t decide whether to condemn or turn him into a joke.

Equally hard to believe in is Taylor Kitsch as a blue-collar dad hooked on OxyContin. Kitsch never looks less than 100 per cent like a movie star and his spiral into addiction is impossible to take seriously. Credulity is stretched further by West Duchovny – daughter of David Duchovny and Téa Leoni – as a glamorous sales rep. She promotes OxyContin remorselessly to doctors. That’s until, out of the blue, she realises that she’s one of the bad guys at a Purdue party while Richard dances with a mascot dressed up as a giant OxyContin pill.

The opioid epidemic was among the great American tragedies of the early 21st century. Blue-collar communities were ravaged. Meanwhile that side of the Sackler family burnished their reputation by donating billions to art galleries, museums and universities. It’s a tale where the gothic melodrama is already built-in. Painkiller’s mistake is to add a note of dark comedy to a story where no embellishment is required.