She earns empathy honestly by making Betsy as real and vulnerable as anybody you might pass the next time you run an errand or grab a cup of coffee. Her journey is really the heart of Dopesick, and while it’s become standard to say this about Dever’s performances, it’s still true: She is just exceptional here, evoking the desperation and powerlessness that comes with addiction and withdrawal without ever succumbing to the clichés that can creep into such portraits. But as soon as Betsy starts taking the stuff, it’s obvious she is going to get addicted. The medication is effective at first the back pain caused by her labor in the mines abates. (As relentless as Billy is, he’s a benign entity when compared to his fellow Pharma rep Amber - played by Hamilton’s Phillipa Soo - who lacks scruples and quite possibly a soul.)įinnix starts prescribing Oxy on a modest basis, including to Betsy, a lesbian struggling to come out to her extremely religious parents (Mare Winningham and Ray McKinnon). He says Ox圜ontin is not addictive and doesn’t spike and fall in the bloodstream the way other opioids do. When Poulter’s Billy, the rep for Purdue Pharma, first suggests that Finnix consider prescribing Ox圜ontin to his many patients suffering from chronic pain, the doctor is skeptical. Finnix comes across as the kind of doctor everyone in America wants and too few of us actually have: a physician who has known you all your life and makes informed decisions about your health because he actually cares. Keaton brings an understated sensitivity to his role as a widower and a committed physician who personally knows all of his patients. In many of these accounts, a palpable sense of the frustration and tragedy comes through thanks to an incredibly capable cast and an admirable resistance to treating the working-class characters like caricatures instead of human beings. But as episodes progress - there are eight total, and seven were provided in advance to critics - whiplash starts to set in as you try to keep track of what’s going on with each of the many story lines that has been established.Īnd there are many story lines, including the ones that involve Finnix and Betsy as well as a pair of federal prosecutors (Peter Sarsgaard and an especially appealing John Hoogenakker) attempting to make the case that actual crimes were committed during the development of Ox圜ontin a DEA agent (Rosario Dawson) who is equally determined to get the drug into fewer hands a Pharma rep (Will Poulter) who is being unwittingly coached in the art of conning doctors to push Oxy on patients and members of the Sackler family, especially Richard (Michael Stuhlbarg), who are fixated on making a profit without regard to the potential loss of life. 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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