Painkiller

I think in terms of positives I'll say the performances are generally good, I think Uzo Aduba especially gives a great performance, Taylor Kitsch too, but with those characters being the purely fictional/composite characters they got all the best dialogue and heaviest scenes, and the wider point to make on that is that the script was not particularly sophisticated, it had a very childish and immature streak throughout, something that played out not just in dialogue but with a fair few pointlessly indulgent visuals, along with an inexplicable and at first confusing deployment of a tired cliche: imagined conversations with a deceased entity, namely Broderick's Richard Sackler character with his long-dead father. Why, for what purpose? What, if anything, about his character had suggested this inner monologue/paternal overhang ('daddy issues') was central to anything he had done, or anything about his character? It just seemed like a lazy gimmick, and it was not the only one. A shame given the material they had to work with was plenty good enough to do better with.

the collision of truth and farce has rarely, if ever, been managed with less grace. what stuns most is that people who must know better have created a mess that no one can salvage. as the carnage revealed itself, i wondered how the production was cobbled together, what the actors said as they did or did not realize the hopelessness of their efforts. and the added pain, the genuine part of this series, was the use of real people telling their tragic stories as a way to give credence to this misbegotten effort.