Within the pages of a script, that journalism-meets-scripted-television approach probably made perfect sense all the time-jumping is much easier to follow when reading versus watching. That American system certainly includes Purdue Pharma, the company that manufactured Oxy and was owned by the Sackler family, but also the FDA and other government agencies that didn’t do enough to properly regulate it. The unspoken mission of Dopesick is to piece together the history of Ox圜ontin in a way that shows how many people’s lives were upended by it and how appallingly easy it was for the American system to enable that. But because of the way those scenes are stitched together, that impact sometimes gets muffled by the sprawling fabric of the whole. Samuel Finnix (Michael Keaton), a doctor who works in a small mining town in Virginia, and Betsy Mallum (Kaitlyn Dever), a miner and a patient of Finnix’s who gets hooked on Oxy - often have real impact. Individual scenes that focus on those supporting players - particularly those that involve Dr. In Dopesick, Ox圜ontin functions like the unspoken protagonist, with all the characters serving as supporting players in its origin story. But its vastness eventually becomes its Achilles’ heel.Ĭreated by Danny Strong, who wrote and directed multiple episodes, Dopesick tries to address so many aspects of the rise of Ox圜ontin that it becomes unwieldy at times, exacerbated by its tendency to hopscotch between time periods - a ticker on the screen is constantly reminding us whether it’s 1999, 2003, or some other year. Hulu’s Dopesick, a new limited series based on Beth Macy’s book Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America, attempts to dig into all of it, with often moving results. The saga of the opioid crisis in this country, the how and why behind the pharmaceutical epidemic that tore through American communities and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, is a huge narrative. Samuel Finnix (Michael Keaton) is a key player in one of Dopesick’s more successful narrative threads.
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