Posted on 06/27/2009 9:24:03 AM PDT by Turret Gunner A20
Twisted Hollywood and its twisted parade of tastemakers known as television critics are forever in search of another "black comedy," and if audiences don't embrace one, then they can always make another one.
Showtime didn't succeed with "Secret Diary of a Call Girl," so now they're trying a different brand of prostitute. "Nurse Jackie" is an addict who has daily sex at noon with her hospital pharmacist in exchange for Oxycontin and other drugs. She's married and a mother of two little girls. She is a filthy degenerate.
http://magazine.townhall.com/beckhttp://magazine.townhall.com/beck
And the critics love it. Matt Roush of TV Guide calls it "a perfect companion piece to the increasingly twisted ‘Weeds,'" as it "straddles the worlds of drama and comedy with confidence and gutsy gusto." For those who don't waste their money on Showtime, "Weeds" is a "comedy" where a suburban housewife is a drug dealer pushing marijuana instead of Avon.
There is no doubt these two shows are a match in blackness.
Nancy Franklin of the New Yorker claimed the new show "feels truer to life than the zillions of one-dimensional (or no-dimensional) nurses on television. It's not just corrective medicine, though -- it actually tastes good."
Let me tell you what The New Yorker thinks "tastes good." In the first episode, Jackie and her gay Muslim male nurse friend are laying in the pews of the chapel of All Saints Hospital where they work, looking at a painting of a beheaded John the Baptist. The male nurse says, "What does one offer as a side dish when serving John the Baptist's head on a platter?" Jackie plays along: "Coleslaw. No -- mac and cheese. No -- potato salad."
If that "actually tastes good" to you, then you should be a TV critic.
Religious themes -- actually anti-religious themes -- surface routinely. In the show's debut, Nurse Jackie lays on the floor, recalling that her schoolteacher Sister Jane du Chantal taught her that those with the greatest capacity for good also have the greatest capacity for evil. "Smart f--ing nun," Jackie says. Viewers will be treated to both sides of Jackie, but the good stuff that emerges only salves the conscience so the viewer can enjoy the evil parts.
Later, a nursing student following Jackie wonders if God is some kind of sadist who wants a certain finite amount of suffering to be spread around the world, that in every place where pain has been alleviated, God imposes it somewhere else. Then she tells drug-addicted, adulterous Jackie, "I think you're a saint."
On her way home, Jackie says in a voice-over that if she were a saint, she'd be like St. Augustine, since he wasn't going to give up his earthly pleasures until he was good and ready. She says, "Make me good, God -- just not yet."
That's not a bargain with God. That's a Hollywood mantra.
Showtime thinks all the fun in "Nurse Jackie" comes when the nurse plays God. She forges a dead man's driver's license to make him an organ donor. She robs a rich doctor to give to that dead man's poor and pregnant girlfriend. She takes the severed ear of a woman-beater and flushes it down the toilet.
As The New Yorker put it, "She has a habit of throwing the ethical rule book away, and the cascade of consequences is hugely entertaining and often unexpectedly funny." Another one of those allegedly hilarious consequences comes when she hides her powdered narcotics in an artificial-sweetener packet, and her boss, anxious to find an artificial sweetener, takes and ingests the drugs in her coffee.
Showtime clearly wants the audience to embrace Jackie and her drug-fogged moral sense. As one slightly less impressed TV critic put it, she is "the health-care equivalent of the whore with a heart of gold." Tom Shales of the Washington Post not only praised the show, but praised the morality of the main character, and how her "years of experience and her highly developed sensitivities are tools she uses to cut to the chase, cut through red tape and cut around middlemen and other gratuitous obstacles planted in her path." In other words, every law she breaks is justifiably broken. None of these TV critics would want to end up in the hospital in real life and answer "yes" to the question "Would you like your nurse to be whacked out on Oxycontin?" In real life, we'd want this woman to go to rehab, and then to marriage counseling. But anything approaching the right moral course would completely ruin all the "black comedy" fun Showtime is having.
PUKE!!!!!!
I love Weeds. It’s a must see for me. It’s second only to Ttue Blood. I watched Nurse Jackie and I’ll watch it again. I don’t want my son seeing it, but I’m an adult and I like to watch different things.
Queers, moral degenerates, drug addicts and such run Hollywood. What do you expect? Of course, they’ll never DARE make fun of mohammedans.... By the way, what is a “Showtime”?
Isn’t a barf alert typically reserved for an article—rather than subject matter—that is repulsive?
I watched the first episode and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was disgusting.
I saw the first episode of NURSE JACKIE.
“Different”, but half because of the novelty of seeing Carm Soprano in a new identity, and a whole new cast of characters getting introduced, and half because the show makes EVERY attempt and consciously strives in the most relentless way, to PUSH THE ENVELOPE with every single detail if presents the audience. Won’t watch it again.
I have known many nurses, and though some of them (early on especially) have problems with substance abuse, I doubt there is even ONE Jackie, as presented, working in an American hospital. Jackie, as usual, is a writer’s fantasy, as is most of what you see on TV.
You barf over what you want to and I'll barf over wht I want to. OK??
The sad part of this presentation, is that it proffers up the idea that nurses or pharmacists act this way. One of the problems I had with the nurse programs on television dramas is that they show the main players acting more like hamsters than humans.
The advertisements for these programs center on two individuals being overcome by emotion, and screwing in the broom closet. And yes folks, this is just another day at the county hooters emergency room.
Mixed in of course is the little girl with a life threatening ailment, the adult losing a parent, or some other situation where the nurse is almost god-like in their methods of caring and coping. Ah, after all we’re all severely flawed, but the beauty of our other actions more than compensates for the animalistic behaviors.
Of course the E.R. is chock full of emergencies 24/7. There’s no time when every room isn’t filled with some touchy feely pablum for folks who love to tear up on a regular basis. Never-mind that very few if any Emergency rooms actually look like this.
No helicopters don’t generally crash in the E.R. parking lot. Ambulance drivers don’t have heart attacks on a regular basis. Nurses on your staff could, but probably won’t contract diseases that make for years worth of drama on television.
People who go into the health care profession based on the portrayals presented on television and the movies, are in for a big surprise.
BTW folks, pharmacists and nurses are required to keep meticulous records concerning Class II Narcotics. The idea that some nurse could trade sex for drugs is realistic, as long as you realize both of these people would be caught, their licenses would be revoked for a period of time, if not in perpetuity, and their ability to find work in their field would be over.
If you think that’s bad, think how hard it is for the lifeguards!
LOL, hey I thought Baywatch was pretty realistic. It wasn’t? :-)
You’re an odd person.
In 20+ years of working in several hospital, I knew ONE nurse who was shooting up...and helped put her out of the business.
She got away with it for a while by falsifying her pain meds injections on the night shift, then using the patient’s intended dose on herself.
It soon became clear that her charting of effectiveness of the doses did not match the patient’s complaints, and the night charge & I set a trap & caught her.
Another tip off was her always wearing a long sleeved sweater over her uniform, when everyone else was complaining about the lousy air conditioning on the long, hot SoCal summer nights; and frequent, short bathroom visits after giving injections.
Now, one night nursing super, OTOH, just liked to “visit” with the night plant engineer in secluded areas on a regular basis. AFAIK, it was just pour le sport.
I worked in a hospital pharmacy for twenty-six years. I know that problems like that don’t go unnoticed. I’m glad your experience was the same.
You mentioned the nigh supervisor, and I don’t deny things like that happen. It’s just not on everyone’s mind constantly like it is in the television shows. In real life, adults aren’t plotting their next sexual conquest with co-workers every five minutes.
OTOH, it was the shift super, so just a clipboard carrier, with too much time on her hands; not a “real” nurse.
Everyone else was way too busy to even think about such things.
Funniest thing I ever ran into concerning a pharmacist was in a hot tub while on vacation 1,500 miles from home. I started talking to another gentleman, who was from yet another state.
When he found out where I worked, he asked me if I knew _______? Of course I did!
“Is he doing alright, getting along fine at work?” Yeah....
“Good; you tell him he doesn’t need to write to Uncle______, now!”
When we got back home,I did, and he laughed his fanny off, and asked me how Uncle______ was looking.
-- Founder, Citizens for Constructive Pedantry Club, or "sipk."
Why. Because I give other people their option about what they barf over?
I should think not.
Because you put a “barf alert” on an article that you appear to agree with. “Barf alert” usually means you not only disagree with the article, you disagree so strongly it disgusts you.
Why? Is it cut in stone somewhere?
And why does it bother you so much?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.