For the record, Nurse Jackie is also addicted to helping her patients
Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie or TV show coming out that week. This week: Inspired by HBO’s High Maintenance, our favorite episodes about pot.
Nurse Jackie, “Apple Bong” (season two, episode four; originally aired 4/12/2010)
By the time Nurse Jackie premiered on Showtime in 2009, the maverick doctor who plays by their own rules and sacrifices procedure on the altar of patient care had long ago become a television cliché. But there wasn’t a TV character quite like Jackie Peyton (Edie Falco), a nurse smarter and more talented than the smug white coats buzzing around the emergency room. As one of Showtime’s first anti-heroines, Jackie had to also have a fiercely kept secret, which in her case was a raging addiction to almost any drug you put in front of her. What started as a reliance on painkillers brought on by years of grueling work in a widow-making hospital rotation blossomed into an indiscriminate addiction that constantly risked destroying her personal and professional lives.