Painkiller, a fictionalized telling of real events, explores some of the origins and aftermath of the opioid crisis in America, highlighting the stories of perpetrators, victims, and truth-seekers whose lives are forever altered by the invention of OxyContin. Painkiller, premieres August 10.

Visit TUDUM.com for a Conversation with EP Eric Newman and Director/EP Pete Berg: 'Painkiller' Exposes Many of the Villains of the Opioid Crisis

TUDUM.com Conversation Highlights Include:

Why Painkiller and it's story continues to be so urgently relevant:

• Says Newman: "The story is still going on. It's playing out in real time, and I imagine that it will continue to play out long after us. It's a story that's so big and so awful that it deserves to be told as often and as loudly as it can be.

Over its six episodes, Painkiller director and executive producer Pete Berg set out to unpack the "how" and the "who" of the epidemic:

• "Everyone knows that the opioid crisis is bad," Berg says. "But this is the origin story of the collision between medicine and money that allowed it to happen. One of the many things that I thought was missing [from the conversation about OxyContin] was the introduction of the drug into mainstream medicine. How Arthur Sackler, this psychiatrist from New York who specialized in lobotomies, started to realize that the future was in pills - specifically in advertising pills. Whoever could market their drug better was going to make the most money."

The tone of the series as a model for the very drug it portrays - extreme, yet intentional.

• Newman states, "We wanted to mirror the effects of opioids: the warmth and the hope and the relief of taking a pill that's going to deliver you from your suffering and then watching it become suffering."

Driven by Berg's success in documentary storytelling, each episode begins with a testimonial from a family member who has lost a child to the opioid epidemic.

• "We wanted to make sure people knew upfront that there might be some farcical moments in this show, but that we don't think there's anything remotely funny about the Sackler family, Purdue and the opioid crisis," says Berg.