The Crime of the Century (Season 1)

The Crime of the Century (2021) is Alex Gibney's two-part documentary you can watch online on iFILM. It argues that America's opioid epidemic never started on the street — it started in corporate offices and regulators' meeting rooms.

Gibney builds his case from insiders: former drug-company reps, doctors, Washington Post reporters and families who buried someone. Through them you see how a painkiller got sold on the promise that it barely hooked anyone — and how that promise rested on cooked data, a wall of lobbyists and prescriptions signed without a second thought.

Part one follows oxycodone and the firm that got rich off it; part two tracks fentanyl and how the crisis mutated. The Oscar-winning Gibney works like a prosecutor, naming names and putting internal emails on screen instead of hiding behind both-sides hedging. It's a heavy watch, but a necessary one for anyone trying to understand how a legal business pushed a country toward hundreds of thousands of deaths. Stream The Crime of the Century online on iFILM.