--- title: "Dopesick" year: 2021 kind: "series" canonical: "https://film.one/tv/dopesick" fi1m_score: 68 critics_score: 66 critics_reviews: 10 published: "2026-09-17T04:01:16.820575+00:00" updated: "2026-09-17T04:01:17.273122+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Dopesick (2021) Created by Danny Strong · MPA TV-MA · Crime, Drama **Fi1m score: 68** · Critics 66 from 10 reviews *In a sentence:* Michael Keaton’s kind, tired face does more damage to Purdue than three hours of prosecutors reading memos > Danny Strong’s eight-part account of how OxyContin took a Virginia mining town has, in Michael Keaton and Kaitlyn Dever, two performances that could carry it alone. It insists on carrying everything else too, and the weight of lawyers and timelines drags it down. ## Synopsis Finch Creek, Virginia, 1996. Dr Samuel Finnix (Michael Keaton) is the only doctor in a coal-mining town, and he knows every family in it. Purdue Pharma has a new painkiller, OxyContin, and a young sales rep, Billy Cutler (Will Poulter), arrives at his surgery with lunch, leaflets and the claim that fewer than one per cent of patients become addicted. Betsy Mallum (Kaitlyn Dever), a young miner, hurts her back underground and needs to be back at work by Monday. In Connecticut, Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbarg) wants the drug to make his family’s company a giant. Years later, prosecutors Rick Mountcastle (Peter Sarsgaard) and Randy Ramseyer (John Hoogenakker) begin asking how the pills got everywhere. ## Review Danny Strong’s eight-part series, written with Beth Macy, whose book it comes from, tells the story of OxyContin from four directions at once. There is the Connecticut boardroom where Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbarg) wants Purdue Pharma to have a painkiller that will make his family richer than it already is. There is the Virginia mining town where the pills arrive in 1996. There is the sales force that carries them there, and, years later, the two federal prosecutors and the drug enforcement agent trying to prove what everyone by then already knows. When the series stays in the mining town it is close to excellent. The rest is there to make sure we have understood, and we had. Michael Keaton plays Samuel Finnix, the town’s only doctor, a widower who knows every patient’s mother and believes a young man in a suit when he says the new pill is barely addictive. Keaton does almost nothing, which is the point: he listens, he frowns at a leaflet, he writes the prescription because his patient is in pain and the leaflet says it is fine. Kaitlyn Dever plays Betsy Mallum, who hurts her back underground and is handed the pill so she can go back down the mine. There is a scene early on where she tells Finnix the tablet wears off after eight hours, not the twelve on the box, and he goes back to the leaflet and reads it again, and Keaton’s face makes the whole of the series’ case in about four seconds. We watched Dever count out pills at a kitchen table and realised we had gone quiet on the sofa; it is the smallest scene in the eight hours and the one we thought about afterwards. Around them the writing is broader. Stuhlbarg gives Sackler a soft voice and a stillness that is properly unsettling, a man who talks about a painkiller the way other men talk about salvation, and he is good enough to survive lines that occasionally make him sound like the villain in a boardroom thriller. Will Poulter’s Billy Cutler, the rep who works Finnix’s surgery, is the series’ best idea: a decent, ambitious young man who wants to be good at his job and is taught, at conferences Neil Spisak dresses in banners and buffet tables, to say “less than one per cent” without asking where the figure came from. Michele Michel puts the reps in sharp suits and the town in flannel and work boots, so you can tell at a glance who is selling and who is buying. Then there are the lawyers. Peter Sarsgaard and John Hoogenakker play Rick Mountcastle and Randy Ramseyer, prosecutors in a small federal office in western Virginia, and Rosario Dawson plays Bridget Meyer, the drug enforcement agent fighting the regulator as hard as the company. All three are perfectly good. Their scenes, though, are mostly people reading documents aloud to one another and looking appalled, and there are a great many of them, because the series has decided that every fact in Macy’s book needs a scene. The structure makes this worse. A caption says 1996, then 2002, then 2005, then 1999, sometimes within the same ten minutes, and for the first two episodes it works as a frame: we see the harm and then the sale that caused it. By the fourth we were counting captions instead of watching faces. The four directors, Barry Levinson, Michael Cuesta, Patricia Riggen and Strong himself, keep a consistent look, with Checco Varese shooting the town under flat grey skies against green hills and Purdue in cold glass and polished wood. Lorne Balfe’s score is low strings, held under nearly everything and pushed up whenever a point is being made. A point is often being made. Against the standard *Chernobyl* (2019) set for this kind of series, one disaster told plainly and in order, *Dopesick* looks nervous. It does not trust that Finnix and Betsy would be enough, and they would have been. Watch it for them, and for Poulter, and let the prosecutors wash over you. You will come away angry about the twelve-hour claim and the one per cent line, and you will have been told about each of them roughly three times. It carries a 15 certificate, and the second half takes turns in the town that we will not describe. *Fi1m score 68, published 17 September 2026.* ## What the critics say Most critics take Dopesick seriously as an angry, clear account of how Purdue Pharma pushed OxyContin and what it did to the people who took it. The praise gathers around the human stories rather than the corporate ones, and around Michael Keaton’s performance as a doctor drawn into addiction, which several reviews single out. Even those who like it least concede it is passionate and often affecting, and nobody doubts the case it makes against corporate greed and the regulators who let it happen. The reservations are almost all about structure. Review after review says the series tries to carry too many threads across too many years, and that the time-hopping blunts the momentum the individual stories build. The spread is wide: Paste rates it highly for its accuracy and ensemble, while IndieWire thinks a dense, dour eight-part series is the wrong shape for the material, and The Hollywood Reporter finds some performances flat or melodramatic. ### Reviews we read (10) - **Empire**, Boyd Hilton (80/100, inferred): The series offers a mostly sober, compelling and clear dramatisation of one of the most shameful examples of big pharma wrongdoing in recent history, which will have you recoiling in fury. It interweaves real-life investigators and fictional characters in a fractured but effective timeline that highlights corporate greed and its human cost. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/tv/reviews/dopesick/) - **The Telegraph** (80/100, inferred): The critic praises the effective telling of the Big Pharma scandal through individual human stories and calls out the repugnant corporate malignancy while noting the challenge of keeping the complex story moving. [Read](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2021/11/12/dopesick-review-stench-corruption-rife-effective-telling-americas/) - **The Times**, Hugo Rifkind (75/100, inferred): The critic views it as a box-set study showing the opioid crisis as caused by 'America generally', praising how well it charts the boom in abuse amid systemic issues. [Read](https://www.thetimes.com/culture/tv-radio/article/dopesick-close-to-me-the-tower-succession-review-j0fbz0fsb) - **The AV Club**, Danette Chavez (B-): The series has admirable intentions in shedding light on the opioid crisis but borders on cumbersome due to its reluctance to short-shrift any narratives and its disorienting nonlinear structure spanning too much ground. [Read](https://www.avclub.com/the-admirable-and-belabored-dopesick-tracks-the-start-o-1847858900) - **The Guardian** (70/100, inferred): The critic finds it a powerful illustration of corporate greed and suffering but notes the series tries to tackle too much, resulting in a chaotic structure that dissipates narrative momentum. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/nov/12/dopesick-review-the-heinous-truth-behind-americas-opioid-emergency) - **Vulture** (70/100, inferred): The ambitious scope of the series dulls its impact despite often moving results from individual storylines, particularly those involving Michael Keaton and Kaitlyn Dever; its vastness becomes an Achilles’ heel through time-hopping and too many threads. [Read](https://www.vulture.com/article/dopesick-review-hulu-series.html) - **Evening Standard** (60/100, inferred): The critic finds it hard-hitting and angry when exploring the human cost but frustratingly muddled and heavy-handed elsewhere due to its ambitious, sprawling approach. [Read](https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/tvfilm/dopesick-tv-show-review-disney-plus-michael-keaton-kaitlyn-dever-will-poulter-b963662.html) - **The Hollywood Reporter**, Daniel Fienberg (50/100, inferred): An important topic is marred by questionable storytelling choices and performances in this muddled telling of an urgent story. While some fictional characters and performances land effectively, the overall structure and many elements feel flat or melodramatic. [Read](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-reviews/dopesick-review-1235023711/) - **IndieWire**, Ben Travers (30/100, inferred): The sprawling eight-episode series is passionate and affecting in its examination of the opioid crisis but feels housed in the wrong package as a dense, dour limited series. [Read](https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/shows/dopesick-review-hulu-michael-keaton-series-1234671254/) - **Paste**, Allison Keene (8.4/10): The series chronicles the opioid epidemic through multiple perspectives on Purdue Pharma's OxyContin push, delivering a heavy but accurate indictment of corporate greed and regulatory failure. Keaton's haunted performance as the addicted doctor and strong ensemble work stand out amid the grim storytelling. [Read](https://www.pastemagazine.com/tv/dopesick/dopesick-review) ## Details - **Created by:** Danny Strong - **Creator:** Danny Strong - **Director:** Danny Strong, Michael Cuesta, Patricia Riggen, Barry Levinson - **Writer:** Danny Strong, Beth Macy, Eoghan O'Donnell, Jessica Mecklenburg, Benjamin Rubin - **Cinematography:** Checco Varese - **Music:** Lorne Balfe - **Production design:** Neil Spisak - **Costume design:** Michele Michel - **Producer:** Richie Kern - **Cast:** Michael Keaton as Samuel Finnix; Peter Sarsgaard as Rick Mountcastle; Michael Stuhlbarg as Richard Sackler; Will Poulter as Billy Cutler; John Hoogenakker as Randy Ramseyer; Kaitlyn Dever as Betsy Mallum; Rosario Dawson as Bridget Meyer; Will Chase as Michael Friedman - **Certificate (MPA):** TV-MA - **Release (the US):** 13 October 2021 - **Genres:** Crime, Drama - **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iJAcTIpNR4 ## Where to watch in the US - Hulu: streaming, uhd - Disney+: add-on, uhd *Checked 2026-09-17.* Also available in: AR, AT, AU, BE, BG, BR, CA, CH, CL, CO, CZ, DE, DK, EC, EE, ES, FI, FR, GB, GR, HK, HR, HU, IE, IS, IT, JP, KR, LT, MX, NL, NO, NZ, PA, PE, PL, PT, RO, RS, SE, SG, SI, TR, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## If you liked this - *The Insider* (1999), Fi1m 89: Mann’s tobacco whistleblower film shows how to tell a corporate scandal through two men. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-insider.md) - *Chernobyl* (2019): The disaster miniseries done plainly and in order, which is what this one needed. - *Winter's Bone* (2010), Fi1m 85: The Ozarks instead of Appalachia, but the same poverty, pills and stubborn young woman. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/winters-bone.md) - *The Constant Gardener* (2005), Fi1m 82: A pharmaceutical company behaves appallingly in Kenya and a widower goes looking for why. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-constant-gardener.md) - *Dark Waters* (2019): Haynes’ DuPont film: one lawyer, one chemical, twenty years, no time jumps. --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/tv/dopesick