‘Painkiller’ Solves Netflix’s ‘Inventing Anna’ Problem By Dragging Scammers: “You’re Dangerous and You’re Dumb”

Netflix’s latest limited series sets the story straight about scammers: they’re parasites. 

Painkiller tells the story of the origin of OxyContin and the tragic events which followed. The show takes a keen focus on opioid abuse, which has since taken the lives of over 300,000 people. In the series, Matthew Broderick portrays Richard Sackler, the real-life chairman and president of Purdue Pharma, the company behind the drug. The practices of the Sackler family, believed to be worth 11 billion dollars, have long been criticized in the media, but this series takes a few creative directions, including an interesting plot focused on the group of college-aged women who are recruited by the company to sell OxyContin to medical professionals. 

In the show’s depiction of the marketers, it rights many of the wrongs of Inventing Anna, another Netflix series that followed the exploits of a scammer and was hugely criticized for glamorizing illegal activities.

The new series equips West Duchovny and Dina Shihabi with holding the reins for the marketing plotline with Shihabi’s Britt Hufford taking Duchovny’s Shannon Schaeffer under her wings to help push sales for Purdue Pharma. At first, Shannon is skeptical of the position, but after witnessing Britt’s flashy lifestyle, she decides to become the company’s biggest cheerleader. 

With Britt’s help, Shannon flirts with medical professionals and denies any wrongdoing of the company, even when met with cold, hard facts. The two characters have an electric chemistry that even ventures slightly into “will-they-won’t-they” territory, but remains unwavering in the nature of their wrongdoings.

During an explosive scene in the second episode, Shannon meets a doctor who refuses to prescribe oxycodone to his patients unless they have cancer or are dying. He compares the drug to heroin and quizzes Shannon about her knowledge of the product. Shannon tries to tell him that OxyContin isn’t addictive, citing the New England Journal of Medicine for allegedly reporting that “the rate of addiction is less than 1%.”

The doctor accuses her of lying and says, “Well, let me ask you this – the molecule in oxycontin is nearly identical to heroin. Do you think heroin is not addictive?” She claims that information is inaccurate. He continues, “Oxycodone, that’s what’s in Oxycontin. Morphine, codeine, hydrocodone, hydromorphone, diacetylmorphine. That is heroin. All come from the opium poppy. Different names. Same shit.”

Shannon is rendered speechless by his rant. He tells her, “You don’t know anything. You’re a teenager trying to sell me Schedule 2 narcotics. You’re dangerous, and you’re dumb — that makes you even more dangerous.”

Throughout the series, Shannon grows in power as she flatters the male doctors and recruits new dealers by advertising the high-class lifestyle that Purdue Pharma has provided her with. She faces a few roadblocks, including one incident where she witnesses two teenagers abusing the drug and immediately getting into a deadly car crash. But her concerns are placated by Britt’s influence and Richard Sackler’s messaging that the drug isn’t addictive by nature, and that the documented incidents are just a result of normal behavior by drug addicts. Shannon continues to push lies and encourage doctors to order higher doses of the medication, as it is a factor in the company’s sales. 

Towards the end of the series, Shannon realizes the harm that the drug can cause and contacts an investigator, Edie Flowers (played by Uzo Aduba), working to sue Pharma Purdue — but by then, the damage has already been done. Shannon delivers a sob story, telling the lawyer that she’s ready to make things right. Unmoved by the young woman’s tears and confident in the evidence she has gathered thus far, Edie responds with, “Do I look like a therapist?” Shannon leaves the cafe while in tears before storming back in with pages of printed correspondence from the company. She gives the papers to Edie and is seldom seen again. 

In real life, Purdue Pharma has faced several lawsuits related to OxyContin over the years and pleaded guilty to downplaying the drug’s risk of addiction in 2007. Doctors have gone on record stating that the marketing of the drug – pushed by the company’s salespeople – has resulted in “adverse health consequences.” 

The smart framing of this storyline differs greatly from Inventing Anna, which covered a different genre of scamming, but nonetheless, gave a personal account from the perspective of the culprit. After the release of Inventing Anna, a victim of Anna Delvey’s lies, Rachel Williams, former Vanity Fair photo editor, filed a lawsuit against Netflix for their depiction of the events. She later claimed in a Vanity Fair interview that the show is a “dangerous distortion” of the real-life fallout and resulted in harm to her reputation.

“The show’s trying to straddle the divide between fact and fiction. I think that’s a particularly dangerous space, more than the true-crime medium, because people sometimes believe what they see in entertainment more readily than what they see on the news. It’s the emotional connections to a narrative that form our beliefs,” she said. “Also hunger for this type of entertainment urges media companies to create more of it, incentivizing people like Anna and making [crime] seem like a viable career path.”

Following Inventing Anna was Hulu’s The Dropout, another show about a popular con artist. 

While it’s undeniable that all three shows sought to deliver multi-faceted perspectives of their controversial subjects, Painkiller allows Shannon the natural empathy she would receive for being a young woman who is hard on times and trying to achieve the American Dream, while still refusing to let her off the hook. The show doesn’t let the audience think, for even a second, that what she was doing was ethical, in any sense. And that message never once gets lost in the flashy world she was living – not with the harassment she received from investigators, medical professionals and men working at the company, nor the casualties she witnessed.

As a result, Painkiller has delivered a flawless breakdown of scammer culture, which is deeply needed in 2023.

Painkiller is currently streaming on Netflix.