Dopesick (2021)★ 8.5/10

Great series, nominated for many, many awards. It is a drama that tells the story of the rise of opioids - a novel painkiller that ended up getting hundreds of thousands of people addicted. The story is told from multiple points of view : the innocent sick people that had chronic pain or had been in an accident and get started on Oxycontin ( that is the commercial name of the drug ) , the physicians who prescribed it , the law enforcement agents that realized early on that it was extremely dangerous and that the whole approval process was very suspicious and, not least, the company that developed the drug and made billions from it. You may get sort of addicted to and keep binging the episodes.

Michael Keaton is an absolute star in Dopesick. The whole cast is first-rate, but Keaton is such a talented artist and we always tend to root for him and his characters. In Dopesick, Keaton plays Dr. Samuel Finnix, a physician from a small town in West Virginia whose economy revolves around mining. The community is targeted for the launching of Oxycon, a new pain medication that is said to perform much better than the then-existing painkillers. It turns out the area was deliberately selected for the introduction of the drug as people have a very hard job in mining and are constantly in pain. Hence, Dr Finnix is a key figure in the ground zero of a colossal health and social crisis.