11 Recent TV Shows That Surprised Everyone

If prompted to picture a drug dealer, the mind is likely to conjure up a shady character.

It certainly doesn’t imagine a meek Michael Stuhlbarg, but Dopesick tells the harrowing story of how his character, Richard Sackler, a seemingly respectable representative of his family’s pharmaceutical company, inflicted widespread destruction on a huge cross-section of American society through the development and marketing of oxycontin, a seemingly miraculous yet dangerously addictive painkiller.

The perspective is split six ways across two timeframes, depicting Sackler’s obsession with increasing profits, the growing conscience of one of his sales reps pushed to sell it as aggressively as possible, a country doctor convinced by his manipulation, one of his teenage patients who becomes addicted, the FBI agent who begins investigating the drug, and the two US Attorneys that start to build a case against it.

In the wrong hands, such a narrative could be a confusing minefield, but it is expertly weaved together.

Serving as a damning indictment of the American medical system that puts profit before patient welfare and regulation (a minor plot point concerns how the company is unable to get the drug approved in Europe).

Coming out around the time the Sackler family were let off with negligible fines and immunity from further prosecution, despite being responsible for hundreds of thousands of overdose and crime-related deaths, Dopesick makes for essential and educated viewing.