SomethingToDo2

The DVD of the first season of US cable show Nurse Jackie is now available locally and I’m a fan.  The series stars Edie Falco as the eponymous Nurse Jackie and is set in a public hospital in New York City. Unlike other medical dramas, this one is understood from the point of view of the nurses. Meaning a lot more emphasis on the ordinary, work-a-day cooperation of the system rather than ER-esque lingering shots of gushing wounds eventually plugged by heroic doctors.

Jackie is a happily married mother of two young daughters, has a bad back, and is also having an affair with the hospital pharmacist. She keeps herself going with lunchtime s-x with said pharmacist and the methodical snorting of Vicoden and various other painkillers and stimulants. In fact, the lunchtime s-x and the drug taking are of a kind, each an addiction designed to take the edge off a way of life predicated on a succession of bad days.

The ensemble cast is brilliant, especially Jackie’s main friend, Eleanor, a doctor in the ER with expensive taste, a flippant disregard for the usual human niceties, and with whom Jackie regularly lunches (always Eleanor’s shout) and discusses the problems of the world, especially their world.  The other great player is Zoey, a student nurse assigned to Jackie’s care and training who thinks that Jackie is an angel.

In fact, Jackie is an angel, maintaining a genuine humanity in a system seemingly designed to extract that very characteristic from every encounter. But she is a dark angel in this dark comedy, with no pretence at all to be anything other than a working stiff trying to do her best for her patients and for her family. That maintaining her humanity constantly involves illegal activities — not just the drug-taking but the occasional assisted suicide or the forging of transplant documents — is an indictment of the system, not of Jackie.

The nice thing about the show is how undramatic it all is.  All of these crimes and misdemeanours, from the drug taking to the affairs, are presented, not as over-arching matters of conscience that require constant, belaboured self-examination, but as the necessary, if unfortunate, crutches a regular human being like Jackie needs in order to help her do her sh-t job in the sh-t conditions of the US public health system while maintaining some semblance of a normal life with her family.

Which is not to say she is a psychopath devoid of a moral centre: far from it.  But her moral concerns are always tempered by the simple fact that in the real world, sometimes doing the right thing means doing the wrong thing.

Like Weeds, episodes are only 30-minutes each, so you can eat up the entire series in no time at all. In fact, the whole thing goes down as easily as cap of Vicodin and a swig of Coke.

The details: Season 1 of Nurse Jackie aired on the Ten Network last year, and is now available on DVD.