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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
8
Mixed:
17
Negative:
4
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Critic Reviews
Aug 10, 2023
The GuardianAug 10, 2023
Season 1 Review:
Aduba comes to enraged life as she describes the sins of the Sackler family for the firm in the present day. Flowers in flashback – as she digs deeper with her investigations – is riveting; tough, disbelieving, straightalking and alternating between determination and despair as the scale of the deception, corruption, addictions, bereavements and misery become apparent.
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Aug 10, 2023
Season 1 Review:
The weakest overall link in the series is the Sackler family material, which never quite comes into focus. This was also the case in Dopesick. Perhaps it’s just difficult to fathom and effectively dramatize such bland, blinkered greed. But Painkiller is still mighty potent, another kaleidoscopic call to awareness of a massive public health crisis and the family most responsible for causing it.
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Aug 10, 2023
Season 1 Review:
Dopesick was brutal, infuriating, and intensely moving, and Painkiller never reaches the same level of humanity and pathos. But the performances are all strong: Aduba delivers cathartic anger and despair as Edie, and Kitsch is dependably empathetic as the everyman who falls victim to what is essentially heroin in a time-release coating.
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The Observer (UK)Sep 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
There are times that Painkiller feels like a cover version of the more atmospheric Dopesick. Nevertheless, it’s thought-provoking, with strong performances (especially from Aduba) and a firm narrative grip on a catastrophe that never stops sounding a grim, shrill alarm.
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The TimesAug 10, 2023
Season 1 Review:
Netflix’s Painkiller does seem like the Johnny-come-lately of the two, and you may get bouts of déjà vu. Yet there is a buzzy, frenetic, angry momentum to it that, along with judicious use of music, carries you along. Even if certain characters are a little superficially drawn.
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IndieWireAug 10, 2023
Aug 10, 2023
Season 1 Review:
The show’s emphasis on dazzle comes at the expense of believable characters or nuanced analysis or emotional resonance; one wonders how much more the show might have been had it not spent so much of its time and energy simply trying to convince everyone to look over here in the first place.
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The IndependentAug 10, 2023
ColliderAug 10, 2023
Season 1 Review:
More than anything, Painkiller feels unnecessarily slight in a fundamental sense. Characters are nearly all made superficial and there is a persistent lack of patience that sets the actors up for failure. By the time we get to the end, everything ties itself up a bit too neatly when the truth of this story is far more complicated.
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Aug 17, 2023
Season 1 Review:
Glib, garish, and ham-fisted. .... Each episode of Painkiller opens with a real person explaining that, while the events in the show have been fictionalized, opioids’ effects on their own lives have been genuinely tragic. They hold up photos of their dead children. Some of them cry. This only manages to make the rest of the show seem even more grotesque.
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