The Sackler Saga Has Made It to Primetime TV. The Latest Episode of ‘The Blacklist’ Takes Aim at the Notorious Art-Collecting Family

The Sackler family probably won’t be thrilled about the latest
episode of The Blacklist, the
James Spader-starring crime thriller. The NBC show’s mid-season
premiere on Friday night concerns the intrigues of a corrupt family
of art collectors who made their billions peddling painkillers.

The fictional clan may be called the Fenbergs, but the real-life
inspiration is not hard to figure out. “If the lawsuit is to be
believed, then they are as bad as the Sacklers, leading the public
and the FDA on about how addictive their drugs are,” one character
says.

And just as the Sacklers have become infamous for their
connections to art, the Fenbergs’ connection to art is also a
centerpiece of the twisty plot: Spader’s character, the
criminal mastermind Raymond “Red” Reddington, gets involved after
he discovers a rash of sophisticated art forgeries that are
affecting his own illicit trade.

The mystery will lead our protagonists to the improbable source
of the fakes (many spoilers from here on out!): a man named Richard
Vitaris (Albert Jones), who is suing the Fenberg family.
His son suffered a football injury, became hooked on
painkillers, and overdosed a year later. Vitaris is broke, and
stealing the Fenberg’s art and selling it to fund his lawsuit,
replacing the originals with sophisticated forgeries.

But how, you ask, is he getting access to the collection? It
turns he is aided by none other than Victoria Fenberg (Gillian
Alexy), the family’s daughter who feels guilty about
the suffering caused by their pharmaceutical business.

In addition to the reference to the Sacklers, the episode is
full of stuff that’s fun for any art audience: cameos for Dutch old
masters Judith Leyster and Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten,
discussions of the market for Fabergé eggs, a glimpse of the
fictional “Olympia” gallery, an explanation of how to forge
paintings using a camera obscura, scenes of sniffing out fakes
using a spectrometer or pigment analysis.

The episode makes it clear that the Fenberg patriarch feels no
guilt whatsoever over the fate of Vitaris’s son—or anyone else who
has died taking his drugs. “We did not kill that boy, and attacking
us isn’t going to bring him back,” he declares at one point.

Vitaris’s fake-swapping scheme is eventually thwarted. As he is
hauled away by the FBI, he demands, “Why don’t you go arrest the
real criminals: The white collar monsters inside that mansion, who
profited from the death of my son?”

Whose side does the show come down on? A scene between
Spader’s Red and guilty Fenberg daughter Victoria near the end is
not subtle: “Your father is a drug dealer,” Red says. “The fact
that he deals a legal drug is no consolation to the addicts he’s
created. He’s the villain in this story.”

The post The Sackler Saga Has Made It to Primetime TV. The
Latest Episode of ‘The Blacklist’ Takes Aim at the Notorious
Art-Collecting Family appeared first on artnet News.