Hulu is moving ahead with Dopesick, an 8-episode limited series focused on America’s opioid crisis, brandishing promising marquee names in headliner Michael Keaton, Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson, Emmy-winning writer/showrunner Danny Strong and veteran Emmy-winning producer Warren Littlefield.
The series, a production of FOX 21 Television Studios eyed for 2021, adapts author Beth Macy’s 2018 journalistic book, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America. Hulu’s series, like the book, will focus on the ordeal of a Virginia mining town, with Keaton starring as Samuel Finnix, who’s described as “an old-school doctor who approaches his practice with kindness and compassion, but finds himself embroiled in Big Pharma’s deadly secret.” Yet, the series will also intersect “unsparing yet deeply human portraits” of families affected by the pill-pushing encroachment of monolithic companies, all while attempting to shine “a hopeful light” for the future. As Bert Salke, President, FOX 21 Television Studios states:
With a straight-to-series order from Hulu in place, Dopesick will manifest under the creative stewardship of writer/showrunner Danny Strong, who, recognizable as an actor (notably from TV runs on Gilmore Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer), has become an offscreen creative force, having co-created Fox’s recently-ended series, Empire, along with script work on films such as The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Parts 1 and 2, Lee Daniels’ The Butler and Game Change (which yielded him two Emmy wins in 2012). As Strong lauds:
Of course, Strong will have as his director the legendary Levinson, a master of comedic drama who, in 1989, took his trade’s top prize for Rain Man, winning the Academy Award for Best Director. After a hit big screen debut with 1982’s Diner, Levinson would go on to field other classics such as The Natural, Tin Men, Good Morning, Vietnam, Bugsy, Toys, Sleepers and Wag the Dog, with more recent offerings in the Bill Murray-headlined Rock the Casbah and HBO TV movie Paterno, and is in post-production for Harry Haft, a biopic of a WWII-era boxer (Ben Foster). Dopesick will see Strong, Levinson and Littlefield joined in the creative coalition by star Michael Keaton, who is also onboard as an executive producer.
