Note: the following contains spoilers for “Painkiller” episodes 1-6.
As “Painkiller” viewers make their way to the end of the six-episode limited series, those holding out hope for justice or a happy ending for characters overtaken by opioid addiction might be disappointed — a choice that director and EP Pete Berg says is only “honest” to the tragedy of the crisis.
“As Uzo [Aduba] says in the middle of the series, the story is a tragedy, and … no matter how much money Purdue Pharma pays to the families of dead people, I don’t know that there’s a number that’s going to ever turn this thing in anything even close to happy,” Berg told TheWrap. “We didn’t want to pretend that there is a happy ending to this story. Unfortunately, there is not.”
In the last episode of “Painkiller,” which is now streaming on Netflix, Shannon’s cooperation enables Edie (Aduba) and her team to pursue a case against Purdue Pharma employees, which concludes in a settlement between the pharmaceutical company and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Despite the disappointment of Purdue Pharma leaving the courthouse with just one count of misdemeanor misbranding, the Sackler family has by no means been let off the hook, according to Berg.
“I think we all feel that the Sackler family is being held accountable, financially and socially — their names have been pulled off of the museums that meant so much to them [and] the medical schools that meant so much to them,” Berg said. “The name now is becoming synonymous with evil greed, and a bunch of other things, and we wanted to touch upon that in the ending.”
Keep on reading to learn how the “Painkiller” team decided Glen’s fate, what Shannon’s cooperation says about her morality and the damning end for the show’s Richard Sackler.
TheWrap: Glen (Taylor Kitsch) is on a strong path of sobriety before he overdoses in the last episode. Can you walk us through his ending?
To pretend that opioid addiction ends happily is not very truthful. For anyone that knows, it rarely ends well. It might not end in death, but it generally ends in a lot of pain, and a lot of amends being cast, and a lot of regret. Glen’s fate, I think, is a very honest to the reality of OxyContin addiction.
How do you understand Shannon’s ending as she cooperates with Edie’s team?
She’s fundamentally a human being. It seems so extreme, if you really think about your life, how many times you reach a moral crossroads, where you actually have to decide whether you have morality, whether, for whatever reason – how you were raised in relationship with your parents, your siblings, or a teacher, a priest or whatever — when you get pushed right to the edge, do you have the ability to search your soul for from moral guidance, and maybe make the right decision, the moral decision? That’s kind of the journey that Shannon goes on — she is given the opportunity to examine her own morality, and she seems to have one.
At the end of the series, the ghost of Arthur Sackler (Clark Gregg) punches Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick) till he’s bloody. What does this ending mean for Richard?
If all you care about is your reputation, your legacy — which we all care about — if you go to such great lengths to hide the reality of how you’re making your money, and pretend to the world that you’re this great patron of the arts and patron of education, and you’re this morally righteous group of people, and that’s how you define yourself, and that gets stripped away and you blow that, I think it probably does feel like, on some level, what Arthur did to Richard in the end … Somewhere in here, Richard must be thinking that or feeling that, and if he’s not, then you’re dealing with true sociopaths stuff — the inability to empathize with anything — and that could be true, too.
Each episode begins with a disclaimer presented by a different family who lived the reality of the opioid crisis through a loved one. Why did you decide to tackle the disclaimers in this way?
We were told by the lawyers that we had to do a disclaimer at the front of each episode because we had composite characters — we had to say ‘much of what you’re gonna see is true and factual, however, some of the facts have been changed for fictitious purposes.’ I don’t really like those disclaimers … They just feel like lawyers talking, and I felt like it didn’t quite sit right with me.
I thought it would be interesting to get family members whose children had died of OxyContin to read the disclaimer and then say, ‘okay, but what isn’t fiction?’ What is true is my 23-year-old daughter died of Oxycontin.’ I thought that would set the tone from the beginning that this is very real business.
“Painkiller” is streaming on Netflix.
