His name may not be familiar to many, but Eric Newman is a true creative force in the film and television we see. The son of composer Randy Newman (Monsters Inc and Toy Story), at a very young age he enlisted his friend James Gunn to write the remake of Dawn of the Dead, and offered her to direct newcomer Zack Snyder.
After a successful career as a producer in the cinema, in which he managed to make films such as Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men and the RoboCop remake, he ventured into platforms with Eric Roth, creating the series Hemlock Grove for Netflix. But it was his obsession with Pablo Escobar and the war on drugs that led to his biggest television hit to date: Narcos, and casting an unknown Pedro Pascal to star in it. And then he continued with Narcos: Mexico.
After describing the complex world of illicit drugs in great detail, Eric Newman premieres this Thursday on Netflix Lethal Medicine, a six-episode miniseries, directed by Peter Berg, which sits the pharmaceutical company Purdue and its painkiller Oxycontin on the bench of the accused. Based on two newspaper articles, it stars Uzo Aduba, winner of three Emmys, as Edie Flowers, an official dedicated to fraud against Social Security and who detects the enormous number of Oxycontin prescriptions that begin to be prescribed in the late 90s. Through her investigation we meet promoter Britt Hufford (Dina Shihabi), who trains Shannon Shaeffer, a poor teenager to use her charms to convince doctors. This character is played by West Duchovny, daughter of David Duchovny and Téa Leoni.
In Lethal Medicine the villain is Richard Sackler, the billionaire doctor who found the perfect solution to rescue the family business from probable bankruptcy in the opiate discovered in 1916, improving its formula to hide its similarities to heroin and designing a sales strategy which ended up addicting millions of Americans. Newman was clear that to play him he had to choose an actor that the viewers liked very much. That is why the chosen one was Matthew Broderick (All in a day).
“Opiates were killing the same number of people (as drugs) and destroying the same number of lives, and those who sold them were just as evil, but since everything was legal, it was seen as a health crisis,” Eric Newman explained. , later adding: "Unlike traffickers who are always honest about who they are and what they do, this group behaved as if they cared about the well-being of human beings."
