‘I loved it. Almost to death’: Stephen King found himself fittingly addicted to a Netflix series critics didn’t care for that hit close to home

Netflix miniseries Painkiller only holds a 49 percent critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 62 percent audience score, but the master of horror couldn’t speak highly enough when he praised it on social media, even if the subject matter hits closer to home than you’d expect from a splashy, stylish, and star-studded streaming series.

As King alluded to, by his own ission he was using “a lot” of Oxycontin in the late 1990s following the car accident that almost killed him, while in a previous life his wife Tabitha staged an intervention in 1987 after his use of cocaine, Xanax, Valium, NyQuil, beer, tobacco, and marijuana saw him begin the journey to sobriety.

Although Painkiller may be fictionalized to a certain extent, diving deep into the opioid crisis still highlights the general sense of desperation that plagued everyone from the perpetrators to the victims who found their lives changed forever after the unstoppable rise of Oxycontin quickly became an epidemic among huge cross-sections of society.

It may not be Netflix’s best-reviewed original of all-time, but if it’s good enough for Stephen King, then you’d imagine quite a few folks left on the fence as to whether or not they should add it to their watch-list have just had their minds made up by the praise emanating from the literary giant.