You know how single-ply yarn can be made stronger by spinning multiple strands of fiber together into a three- or four-ply yarn? That’s what the middle two episodes of Painkiller are doing with their multiple narrative strands.
As Edie Flowers continues to lead us through her painstaking and increasingly horrified investigation of OxyContin in Virginia, Glen Kryger’s dependency on the drug explodes into a full-blown addiction. As the ambitious young sales rep Shannon Schaeffer grows more successful, she also witnesses firsthand how this supposed miracle drug can become lethal. And as Richard Sackler and Purdue Pharma revel in their successful, lucrative, and ethically dubious navigation of the FDA’s drug-approval process, they find themselves in the sights of a congressional investigation into the risks of OxyContin’s widespread availability and use.
At some point, many of these strands will overlap snugly, but until then, they’re either just out of each other’s reach or overlapping loosely. For ease, I’m going to consider them chronologically.
Purdue’s FDA application for OxyContin was not the slam dunk the Sacklers were anticipating, ground to a halt repeatedly by Dr. Curtis Wright, an evaluator who, as Edie puts it, was the one guy who gave a fuck. He couldn’t be cajoled into agreeing with their assertion that OxyContin was safe and virtually non-addictive, so they switched up their tactics with maximum ego-stroking, but what eventually worked is … unknown. What is known is that eventually, Wright saw his way clear to approving the application and some unique label language, and a year or two later, Wright went to work for Purdue. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Who can say?
Painkiller leans too heavily on the flashy montages that pepper each episode — particularly when combined with the series’s most Sorkinian bits of dialogue, they’re a glibness bridge too far — but they are memorable. The ones I can’t get out of my mind from this pair of episodes are Wright celebrating his high-salary job at Purdue and the enormous victory celebrations Purdue holds once the FDA approval comes through. Over Rick Ross’s “Hustlin,’†we see Wright cannonballing into his pool, wearing only a Speedo emblazoned with the OxyContin logo on the tush, as cheerleaders in OxyContin blue-and-white shake both their pom-poms and what their mamas gave them. Yeah, his ass literally belongs to Purdue.
Richard’s big party reflects his flair for drama and lavishness, including a live brass band covering Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk.†Richard’s father, Raymond, grumbles about the tuba maybe being too much, so I guess not everyone has a proper appreciation for Lindsey Buckingham’s most baroque and paranoid (and perhaps cocaine-fueled) flights of musical genius.
The ensuing montage of fawning press coverage for Purdue’s miracle drug intercut with Richard, Mortimer, and Raymond’s triumphant photo shoot in front of Purdue HQ and then capped by an extended close-up tracking shot of Richard’s dog’s intact testes as he and the dog enter the Purdue offices to a standing ovation from staff … is a lot to process. The sheer volume of content, the variety of images, and the off-putting tone of these montages add up to a fever dream of effective exposition. If watching them made you feel like you needed to take a shower, you are not alone.
Once OxyContin was approved, its sales and marketing machine got to work convincing the doctors of America to prescribe it in ever-higher volumes and dosages. In the continuing education of Shannon Schaeffer (and viewers), Britt explains to her at a physician-education event that prescription quantity was only part of the moneymaking machine. The real money was in convincing doctors to prescribe higher-dosage pills, which yielded higher payments from insurance companies, which then trickled down to correspondingly larger bonuses for the sales team. Shannon could jump from a $6,500 bonus to $20,000 or even $30,000 in a single year.
The sales visits are a heady mélange of flirtation and innuendo, flattery, and low-key threats to the physicians on Britt’s and Shannon’s rosters. There’s a distinct whiff of mafia protectionism and plausibly deniable sex work in the air as Shannon uses every tool at her disposal to convince her client Dr. Cooper to increase his patients’ dosages. Her success in buttering him up leads directly to her buying a cute blue Porsche. Unfortunately, it also leads directly to a patient Shannon recognizes from Cooper’s office, Jessie Brewster, who is developing an addiction to OxyContin.
Seeing Jessie snort crushed-up OxyContin from a prescription she’d just scammed in an urgent-care-center parking lot nurtures a massive seed of doubt in Shannon’s mind. Does everyone need Oxy? Are higher doses actually safe? She’s shaken by her memories of Jessie and her friend, recalling that they were nodding off in their car and then caused a two-car accident as they peeled away. For someone who claims to care deeply about alleviating the suffering of others, Britt is remarkably unimpressed with this story when Shannon gets home, brushing it off as just so much ignorable junkie behavior.
Britt’s view is illustrated perfectly by Jessie’s fate. Her friends dump her unconscious and cyanotic body in the front yard of Dr. Fitzgibbons’s in-home practice. Unlike moments when our faces are nearly shoved into the perspective of an OxyContin user, we only see this tragedy unfold from a distance. There are no close-ups, and the sound is very slightly unclear as Fitzgibbons yells for an ambulance, then futilely attempts to resuscitate a child whose birth he had attended 16 years earlier.
The real problem, as far as Purdue is concerned, isn’t any particular addict’s behavior, but Shannon’s. Her sales-visit notes include some comments about patients who are dependent and medication-seeking rather than seeking help for pain relief. There are hints of organized crime in Purdue’s response here as well: A review of Shannon’s notes leads to a one-two of a massive promotion to an elite sales team and a gentle yet very pointed bit of advice from general counsel Howard Udell to simply call his office if she notices anything worrisome on future sales calls … so that he can address it the right way, of course.
Calling in concerns rather than incorporating them into sales-call notes, emails, or memos is vital, because reports of addictive behavior are flooding into Purdue and the media, and the last thing they need is a more robust paper trail.
The paper trail that already exists is bad enough, and Udell knows it. The dogged, creative Edie Flowers knows, too, meeting with law enforcement, pharmacists, a medical examiner, and the OxyContin conscientious objector Fitzgibbons. Eventually she even speaks with an FDA application evaluator, who confirms Edie’s skepticism about the unique label language Purdue negotiated with Wright: “Delayed absorption as provided by the OxyContin tablet is believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug.†Believed by who? On the basis of what? It warms the cockles of this grammar nerd’s heart that Painkiller devotes a minute or so to directly highlighting the rhetorical evils of the passive voice. If we don’t know who is doing something, how do we know their intent and degree of responsibility for an outcome? How do we know anything beyond the veil that “is believed†draws across OxyContin?
All of this new knowledge is interesting to Edie’s new boss, Virginia U.S. Attorney John Brownlee, and he’d love to do something about it, but as he points out repeatedly, none of what she’s learned is a crime. People can’t be arrested for using a legal, prescribable medication; pharmacists are going to fill patients’ legal prescriptions; prescribers believe their patients who come to them are in need. Autopsies that reveal stomachs full of undigested OxyContin pills are grim, tragic data points, but they’re not crimes. Even the rafts of data Edie has pointing to spikes in robberies and assaults in communities ravaged by OxyContin aren’t enough. She’s got to find a crime at the root of Oxy, or there’s nothing for their office to prosecute.
There’s no crime to prosecute yet, but at Purdue, even its enormous swimming pool of money is insufficient to paper over certain alarming developments. Gruesome reports of homeless drug mules dying and losing limbs, the increasing numbers of overdose victims, a montage of critical news coverage about the fastest-growing drug in America: As the spirit of Arthur Sackler cautions Richard, “this is real big-boy shit … OxyContin mule is not an enduring phrase that you want to attach to our product.†Of course, Arthur would hardly be Arthur if he didn’t have a response in his ghostly back pocket. The supply is not the problem, not at all! They need to attack the demand, go after “the lowlife abusers,†and hammer the addicts when they have to send company representatives to testify before Congress on this issue.
The addicts they’re hammering include people like Glen Kryger. After his terrifying episode at the Cracker Barrel, he undergoes detox at a local hospital and confidently flushes his remaining OxyContin supply down the toilet. This isn’t the tapering off his doctor urged him to do, but he feels like himself again. Everything’s going to be fine! Until it’s not. Glen nearly getting crushed to death by a car falling off a lift that he didn’t secure properly is definitely not fine, and the truth comes spilling out in a torrent of rage from Ty, who’s noticed Glen’s renewed relationship with Oxy.
And yet, the OxyContin train continues to roll on: When protestors picketed Cooper’s office following Jessie Brewster’s death, Shannon makes it up to him by recruiting him for a lucrative side gig as a continuing-education speaker. It’s a nauseating full-circle moment, as Cooper’s participation guarantees that more doctors will prescribe increasing doses of OxyContin to their patients, creating more Jessie Brewsters and Glen Krygers along the way. Purdue isn’t just supplying the drug; it is actively creating more demand and an ever-increasing supply of potential addicts.
When Purdue executives testify before Congress, they express concern and sorrow for those who’ve had bad experiences with their medication and assure the nation that they’ve only just learned of the problems with misuse themselves. Lying in and of itself isn’t a crime, but lying under oath very much is. Finally, Brownlee, Edie, and their colleagues have something to sink their teeth into.
Odds & Ends of Interest
• A couple of noteworthy guest stars in these episodes! Series director Peter Berg appears as the car salesman who steers Shannon to her blue Porsche, while series co-creator/co-writer Noah Harpster (a.k.a. Bill Strausser from my beloved For All Mankind) appears as Curtis Wright.
• Kudos to the costume designer for putting Shannon in an ever so slightly too-fitted buttercup-yellow blouse and very youthful-looking ponytail with two wispy tendrils at the front. It makes Shannon stick out visually, flagging her as very young and naïve. Her awful mentor, Britt, can’t be more than three or four years older than Shannon, but with her flowing, beachy waves and ivory silk charmeuse blouse, she looks far more sophisticated.
• These episodes’ mothers of OxyContin victims introduce their children: Patrick and Elizabeth. Patrick’s mother reminds viewers that “time does not heal all wounds, grief is not a process, it’s a lifelong weight on our heart and on our soul.â€