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Why I love Nurse Jackie

I hardly know where to start with Nurse Jackie, the TV series in its first season on Showtime.  There really is not another show like it that I can think of.  Yes, it takes place in a hospital, following the experience of an ER nurse named Jackie, portrayed by Edie Falco.  This may sound familiar on the surface.  Jackie performs admirably in her job and is respected by her colleagues.  Yes, yes, this sounds familiar.  ER nurse as saint.  Jackie is a 40-something, pill-popping adulteress.  Okay, maybe saint/sinner.  Still, a little familiar.

Maybe the cognitive dissonace begins when we think of the ideal here….the “saint” portion of the picture.  The warm, caring nurse who does everything in her power to assist, as best she is able, the unfortunate souls who end up in the emergency room.  At once maternal, tough, nonjudgmental.  Now turn this ideal inside out.  From Jackie’s eyes: chaos, neverending crises, death, alternately smug and detached doctors, the trenches of a broken system.  And it’s her job to hoist up her end of the mast.  Is it any wonder, then, that in order to actually perform well in this untenable situation, that she feels a need for enough drugs to kill a small horse?

I recall a radio interview I heard recently with Nick Reding, the author of Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, in which he follows closely the lives of individuals who are and have been caught in the grips of meth addiction.  Overwhelmigly, he said, his interviewees took up meth in the first place as a way to just get through their days of hard hard work.  Having been forced out of decent jobs that paid a living wage, they were often forced into multiple low-wage, menial jobs which, all told, barely covered living expenses if they were lucky.  On meth, they found they could do their jobs and cruise through the day, full speed ahead, doing what they had to do just to get by.  “Good people, bad drugs” is how he characterized it.

On drugs, Jackie’s will to despise the situation in which she must perform is dissipated.  She ends up in a Faustian bargain, though, as her need to seek out drugs eclipses her need to perform her job well.  To create a pipeline to the drug supply, she forms a sexual relationship with the hospital’s pharmacist, even though she is married to a devoted man and has two young daughters.  Jackie’s wedding ring comes off her finger before she ever sets foot in the hospital, making her family life secret to all but one confidant at her workplace.  She is no longer in control.

As interesting as it is a character study (and Falco performs magnificently), Nurse Jackie is also a scathing indictment of the health care system, and how those in the Emergency Room in particular bear a lot of the brunt when push comes to shove.  Equally so, the drug industry, which promises help in a bottle, then we are demonized when the need for help becomes a dangerous habit.

I’ve read some reviews online written by folks who are themselves nurses, and are upset at the portrayal of a nurse as an addict.  I can understand that, but I am fairly confident that Jackie is not meant to represent nursing as a profession, so much as to represent the Modern Condition; good people stuck in untenable situations that end up sacrificing the best parts of their lives (in Jackie’s case, her family life, at least so far) in order to force all of the pieces into some sort of workable whole.

It’s not hard to predict that Jackie’s life will indeed fall to pieces, as her behavior is unsustainable.  What began as perhaps a bad back (though I’m still unsure as to whether this was invented by Jackie to get an in with the pharmacist, or a real problem) is sure to end in a total and complete fall from grace (and it’s also probably no accident that her eldest daughter is named Grace, so pun intended).

Tags: edie falco, nurse jackie, showtime, TV