She’s one of those patients, Betsy, a young woman hiding her sexuality from ultra-religious parents (played by Mare Winningham and Ray McKinnon) while joining the family business mining coal. He’s Samuel Finnix, an idealized country doctor who knows all his patients and even makes house calls in the mid-Nineties. Keaton and Dever play fictional composite characters living in and around the coal mining industry. One episode opens with a chyron declaring that it’s one year later than the previous installment, but what does that mean in a story where the action is constantly scrolling between eras? As is usually the case, the fractured narrative creates more problems than it solves, making it harder to connect the dots from various Purdue tactics to the ways in which ordinary people are harmed by them. And good luck keeping track of the miniseries’ four timelines - one for each investigation, one for Richard Sackler, and one for Michael Keaton and Kaitlyn Dever as two victims of the crisis - without a conspiracy board handy. It’s meant to offer dramatic tension, and to illustrate just how invulnerable a corporation like Purdue can seem, but it doesn’t work. And introducing Bridget after her attempt has crashed and burned undercuts every scene where she seems to be making progress. Though Bridget attacks the problem from different angles than Rick and Randy do, shifting between the two cases creates a feeling of redundancy. One is Meyer’s DEA operation the other involves Virginia prosecutors Rick Mountcastle (Peter Sarsgard in a really distracting wig) and Randy Ramseyer (John Hoogenakker), who eventually learn that Bridget already tried and failed to bust Purdue. Dopesick bounces around from 1996, when Purdue put Ox圜ontin on the market, through two federal investigations into the drug’s effect on society that unfold over the course of a decade. Strong becomes the latest prestige-TV creator to fall in love with nonlinear storytelling to his own detriment. Individual episodes feel too long, and Dopesick as a whole seems to have no business lasting eight-plus hours, repeating various logistical and thematic details again and again with diminished effectiveness each time. In isolated moments, the miniseries functions exactly as prescribed, offering a devastating portrait of how Purdue helped turn us into, as DEA agent Bridget Meyer (Rosario Dawson) puts it, “a pill-popping zombie nation.” More often, though, the drama’s emotional impact fades too quickly, and chief writer and producer Danny Strong ( E mpire) attempts to compensate by doubling the dosage. This is, unfortunately, the narrative philosophy of Dopesick itself. Neither claim proved true, a fact that Sackler and his underlings tried to conceal by insisting that the drug’s failures were actually signs of patients suffering “breakthrough pain.” The only treatment for that condition, they said? You guessed it - even more Ox圜ontin, which only decreased the medication’s effectiveness and increased its addictive qualities, on and on, until whole communities were being destroyed. Pharma execs and sales reps insisted that the painkiller was both nonaddictive and long-lasting. The new Hulu limited series Dopesick adapts Beth Macy’s investigative bestseller about the causes of the opioid epidemic - and, specifically, the role that the family-run Purdue Pharma company and its chairman, Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbarg) played in getting America hooked on Ox圜ontin.
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