Friends,
Miniseries offer a great alternative to shows: between watching the same story over four seasons or watching four miniseries, the latter is often a more enriching experience.
Netflix has delivered some of the best entries the genre has known in a long time: Wild Wild Country, When They See Us, Unbelievable, Manhunt, and 1994 to name a few. The Pharmacist, an excellent four-episode miniseries new on Netflix today, is right up there with the best of them.
The Pharmacist
Premieres on Netflix today.
It’s difficult to describe this miniseries as just one thing: it has elements of true crime, but it’s more than just a “Netflix true-crime show.” It’s also about an immensely empathetic and likable family man who joins the fight against the opioid epidemic.
Dan Schneider, a small-town pharmacist, lost his teenage son to drug-related violence in New Orleans’ notorious Lower 9th Ward neighborhood. With corruption rampant in the city’s police department, he takes matters into his own hands and starts investigating his son’s murder.
Beyond this murder, Dan notices a rise in opioid prescriptions from one doctor. Fueled by a relentless determination to protect other children from addiction, he quits his job and begins to gather evidence against this doctor and, by extension, the company responsible for the sale of Oxycodone: Purdue Pharma.
📺 On Netflix everywhere; 🍅 rating: unavailable
Alternatives you might like
Apart from the miniseries mentioned in the introduction, I really recommend Flint Town, also on Netflix. It follows an understaffed police unit in Flint, Michigan, as they do everything to contain the rise in crime in the city that is most famous for suffering from a disastrous water crisis.
Evil Genius is another miniseries produced by Netflix. It’s about an unlikely bank robbery that resulted in a high-profile murder case known as the “pizza bomber.”
Talk on Friday,
Bilal