The Pain Scale-- Nurse Jackie

Hey guys -- thanks so much for all your support on Dead Girl, Live Boy. I have the best and dearest friends in the blogosphere! Nurse Jackie returns tomorrow night. I've read a lot of reviews of the first two seasons and look forward to season three the way Jackie looks forward to an unsupervised medicine cabinet. Jackie is a heroine for our time -- troubled and duplicitous and yet loving and hopeful. A lot of reviewers have complained that nothing happens in Nurse Jackie, a criticism I find that totally misses the mark. In a show about addiction, the structure has to be circular. It's all about Jackie's deception and her treading water. Jackie appears nowhere near what AA refers to as a "bottom." She's functional in all her roles -- nurse, mother, friend, wife. How functional is often the question this series asks. We as the viewer know her life is unmanageable and yet she manages. It's not pretty on a moral scale -- like the pain scale in doctor's offices, we have degrees of fuckedupedness. Like the limbo, we ask ourselves how low can she go? With the new season, we'll see her twists and turns. Chekhov says we live two lives, one public, one private. Nurse Jackie takes this dictum and makes it flesh. Who is she? Perhaps she doesn't even know. In a pivotal scene last season, her lover/pharmacist Eddie says to her: "Anyone who knows you knows they don't know you." Alas, Eddie knows her in a post-modern way which is to say that he knows that the reality he's presented isn't all of the story. We watch and wait to see the degrees of exposure and loneliness that dog Jackie. The question isn't the how, but the why. The why keeps me watching. Stay tuned here for a review after the first episode.

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Sunday!