Michael Keaton will be hitting the small screen to star and executive produce a show based on Dopesick, a New York Times bestselling book on the opioid crisis.
Dopesick will be an eight-episode limited series from Keaton and writer Danny Strong (Empire). It’ll feature Keaton as Samuel Finnix, a doctor who becomes entangled in the world of Big Pharma. The series will be directed by Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Man of the Year).
“The opioid crisis is one of the most important stories of our time and I’m honored to not only pay tribute to its victims but to shine a light on the heroes that fought back. Laws were broken and many lies were told. The system failed us and Dopesick is going to show everyone how it all happened,” Strong said in a statement.
While exact plot details and other casting is yet unknown, we do know Dopesick is set to take viewers “from a distressed Virginia mining community, to the hallways of the DEA, and to the opulence of ‘one-percenter’ Big Pharma Manhattan.”
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company That Addicted America was a bestseller in 2018 by author Beth Macy. EW’s review of the book applauded Macy’s work for “placing broken faces onto horrifying data sets. One grieving mother wonders how her son could go ‘from being a high school football hunk… to a heroin-overdose statistic.’ The answers Macy arrives at are bleak, fatalistic, and enraging.”
Keaton is building on a string of roles where he’s at the heart of true stories, including 2015’s Spotlight and 2016’s The Founder. Keaton is also set to play a role in Aaron Sorkin‘s upcoming The Trial of the Chicago 7, a true story of a group of seven defendants charged by the federal government with conspiracy, inciting to riot, and more during the 1968 Democratic Convention.
Dopesick will stream on Hulu, with a premiere date not yet announced.
