New Yorker article, “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” and Barry Meier’s book, “Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic.” It retells the opioid crisis from several different perspectives, including billionaire Richard Sackler (Broderick) and his team at Purdue Pharma (Sackler has denied responsibility for the crisis); Edie Flowers (Uzo Aduba), a lawyer working for the US attorney’s office in Roanoke who’s investigating the drug OxyContin; Glen Kryger (Taylor Kitsch), a family man with a small business who gets hooked on OxyContin after he’s injured at work; and Shannon Shaeffer (West Duchovony), a new recruit to the Purdue sales team who begins having doubts. “Back in 2003, I was working at the New York Times and we got a tip that there was this new drug called OxyContin that was running wild on the streets of all these small towns,” Meier, a consulting producer on the show, told The Post. “I started reporting on it, and I found myself at the dawn of this prescription drug disaster that we now know as the opioid epidemic.

I wrote a book about it. The story… sat and sat, and thankfully 20 years later, Eric [Newman] and other people came along and turned it into a fantastic show.”Director/executive producer Peter Berg told The Post that this topic is personal for him. “I know people who have died from OxyContin … And I know some big famous names who died from OxyContin — people like Prince, who was one of my heroes, Tom Petty, Chris Cornell,” he said. “The loss of human life to addiction is something that I’m very cognizant of.

When Eric [Newman] came to me about a show about the birth and popularity and mass-marketing of what is essentially heroin, it was very appealing to.

‘Painkiller’ star Matthew Broderick gives his take as ‘a Bond villain:’ producer

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