Television series
The Crime of the Century
Alex Gibney's two-part HBO documentary is less a chronicle of addiction than a forensic autopsy of the system that manufactured it — Purdue Pharma, the Sackler fortune, the DEA officials who looked away, the doctors paid to prescribe. It's dense, angry, meticulously sourced television, built for people who want the paper trail, not just the tragedy.
If you liked this
Dopesick2021
Danny Strong's dramatization covers the same Purdue/Sackler machinery but puts a face and a family on it — Michael Keaton's small-town doctor makes the abstraction of 'over-prescription' devastatingly personal.
But It's fiction dressed as history, so the composite characters and compressed timelines can blur what's documented fact.
Painkiller2023
Netflix's limited series takes a pulpier, angrier swing at the same story, with Matthew Broderick as a chillingly banal Richard Sackler and real deposition footage baked into the drama.
But The tonal whiplash between courtroom satire and grief can feel uneven, and it leans harder into villainy than nuance.
The Pharmacist2020
A grieving father turns amateur investigator after his son's overdose, and the four-part Netflix series follows him street by street into pill mills — grassroots justice where Gibney's film goes institutional.
But It's slower and more local in scope; don't expect the sweeping regulatory indictment of the bigger picture.
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
The Insider1999
Same corporate machine, different poison — proof the Sacklers didn't invent the strategy, they inherited it from Big Tobacco almost verbatim.
Michael Mann's tense, superbly acted thriller about a tobacco executive turned whistleblower shows this exact playbook — corporate cover-up, captured regulators, a media system reluctant to bite — running two decades before Purdue ever did it.
But It's a two-and-a-half-hour '90s prestige drama with a slow, dialogue-heavy build; nothing here is documentary fact.
More like this (8)
Heroin(e)2017no page yet
A 39-minute Netflix short following a fire chief, a judge, and a street missionary in West Virginia — the human cost distilled into almost no runtime at all, and unbearably moving for it.
But It's a vignette, not an investigation — no corporate villains, just the wreckage they left behind.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room2005
The blueprint for corporate-crime documentary as thriller — arrogance, fraud, and collapse rendered with the same forensic clarity Gibney brings to Purdue, minus the body count.
But Financial engineering is drier terrain than addiction, and some of the accounting detail demands real attention.
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief2015
Gibney again, turning the same patient, evidence-stacking method on an institution built on control and silence — if you liked his approach here, this is the other essential entry in his filmography.
But Different subject entirely; the parallels are structural, not thematic, so don't expect anything about drugs or medicine.
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley2019
Elizabeth Holmes and the Sacklers rhyme uncomfortably well — charismatic liars, captured regulators, a fraud everyone was incentivized not to see until it was catastrophic.
But Theranos's damage was financial and reputational rather than half a million lives, so the stakes feel lower by comparison.
Icarus2017
Starts as a scrappy doping experiment and mutates into a state-sponsored conspiracy thriller — proof that institutional rot, once you start pulling the thread, rarely stays small.
But Sports doping is a much lower-stakes crime than an opioid epidemic; the tonal register is closer to caper than tragedy.
Cartel Land2015
The drug war from the supply side — vigilantes and cartels in Mexico and Arizona — a bracing, morally murky counterpart to a story told almost entirely from boardrooms and courtrooms.
But It's a different war altogether, immediate and violent rather than bureaucratic; the connective tissue is thematic, not factual.
Requiem for a Dream2000
Gibney shows you the boardroom that created the crisis; Aronofsky shows you, unflinchingly, what happens at the other end of the supply chain.
Darren Aronofsky's addiction nightmare abandons every talking head and every statistic for pure sensory collapse — split screens, screeching strings, bodies breaking down in real time.
But It is genuinely punishing to sit through, formally aggressive and emotionally merciless, with none of the documentary's analytical distance.
How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)2019no page yet
Same economics of addiction and distribution the documentary dissects, reflected back through a wildly different genre, generation, and register — illegal instead of legal, comic instead of tragic.
A German teen dramedy about a heartbroken kid who accidentally builds a darknet drug empire — fast, funny, stylish, and sneakily sharp about how easily a supply chain scales once demand exists.
But It's a coming-of-age comedy with subtitles, played largely for laughs — tonally about as far from Gibney's grim indictment as you can get.
People
Production
- Aaron FishmanExecutive Producer
- Alex GibneyExecutive Producer
- Lisa HellerExecutive Producer
- Nancy AbrahamExecutive Producer
- Richard PerelloExecutive Producer
- Stacey OffmanExecutive Producer
- Todd HoffmanExecutive Producer
- Sarah DowlandProducer
- Svetlana ZillProducer
- Tina NguyenProducer