Nurse Jackie, an American medical comedy-drama series created by Evan Dunsky, Liz Brixius, and Linda Wallem, premiered on Showtime on June 8, 2009.[1] The series stars Edie Falco as title character Jackie Peyton, a nurse addicted to painkillers while working in the emergency ward at All Saints' Hospital in New York City. The series concluded on June 28, 2015, after 80 episodes over seven seasons.
Nurse Jackie - Season 7
A car accident brings three severely wounded into All Saints. As a nurse struggles to get vitals going, Dr. Prince takes charge ordering Jackie to assist. The whole diversion flag is raised, but he dismisses the issue.
Look for the man behind Hank Lawson on the aforementioned USA hit to portray Barry Wolfe, a high-powered, dead serious attorney who will represent Jackie as she puts her life back together following her arrest last season.
Among the large collection of licensed content leaving Netflix in the US come December will be all seven seasons of Nurse Jackie created by Liz Brixius, Evan Dunsky, and Linda Wallem.
April 5, 2015 - A week from today on April 12, Nurse Jackie will return for its seventh and final season on Showtime. Over the years, the critically respected show has given its global audience perhaps the strongest depiction of a modern nurse in the history of series television. New York emergency department (ED) nurse Jackie Peyton is expert, fearless, savvy, sensitive, and creative, with a wide array of psychosocial skills. She has even been a great mentor to Zoey Barkow, her gifted protegee who has emerged from Jackie's shadow and may now be poised to assume Jackie's central role in the ED and/or to become a nurse practitioner. That transition may have accelerated because, as many real nurses have complained, on a personal level Jackie is a train wreck. She is a "world class liar" who has struggled with addiction since the beginning, and never more so than at the end of the sixth season. At that point she finally seemed to have alienated almost everyone in her life, and possibly blown the one key relationship she had always managed to preserve--her relationship with nursing. She even made a serious clinical error as a result of her drug use, something the show has not shown enough. Zoey saved the patient. Many real nurses were never able to get past Jackie's personal flaws, but none of those flaws were nursing stereotype, and we always felt she was a persuasively complex mix of great talents and frailties, as some humans are. Had she been perfect, we would not even be talking about a second season, much less a seventh one. We ourselves have objected to the show's occasional suggestions that hospital nurses report to physicians in the clinical setting, despite the presence of nurse Gloria Akalitus, who seems to have some administrative responsibility for the ED. In any event, we thank those responsible for what the show did well for nursing, especially producers Lix Brixius, Linda Wallem, Caryn Mandabach, Richie Jackson, and Brad Carpenter; nurse advisor Jennifer Cady, RN, BSN; and actors Edie Falco and Merritt Wever. See Nurse Jackie on the Showtime site.
April 14, 2013 -- With the fifth season of Showtime's Nurse Jackie set to begin tonight, it's time to review the last season, which aired in spring 2012 and once again highlighted the central role nurses play in patient care. Most of the season focused on Jackie's recovery from her drug addiction and other personal issues. But when there were clinical scenes, the show continued to present Jackie, at least, as essentially a peer of the physicians. She was a clinical leader providing creative technical and psychosocial care. And in the last two episodes of the season, she actually took over the emergency department in the midst of a staffing crisis, running it expertly until the malevolent hospital CEO Mike Cruz fired her. The show also featured more credible, compelling interactions among nurses, and between nurses and physicians, showing that nurses are sentient three-dimensional beings. All of that is rare in Hollywood. Jackie's quirky mentee Zoey Barkow continued to show potential as a future version of Jackie--at several points Zoey showed the kind of clinical courage and initiative that Jackie does. There is still no really strong male nurse character, though nurses Thor and Sam do seem to have settled into their roles as competent, funny Jackie acolytes. On the downside, the show continued to struggle to portray nursing autonomy. There were several more suggestions that physicians control nurse staffing, and, after Cruz demoted nurse-manager Gloria Akalitus to staff nurse, the show proceeded without any apparent nurse managers at all. Still, on the whole, Nurse Jackie remains probably the best show for nursing in U.S. primetime television history. The executive producers of the show are Linda Wallem, Liz Brixius, Richie Jackson, and Caryn Mandabach. more...
May 2012 -- As we reach Nurses Week in the United States and the fourth season of Showtime's Nurse Jackie gets underway, it's worth reviewing last year's third season, in which the show's tough, expert central character bluntly dismissed the annual appreciation week as "patronizing." The third season continued the show's run as the best dramatic U.S. television portrait of nurses in decades, perhaps ever. Sure, most of the season was not about clinical work, the show faltered badly on nursing autonomy (repeatedly suggesting that nurses report to physicians), and Jackie's ongoing drug problem remains a bit hard to reconcile with her clinical prowess. But when there were clinical scenes, Jackie remained essentially a clinical peer of the physicians, and in general, the nurse characters actually performed their own work, including triage and patient education. Jackie provided expert holistic care to emergency patients including a distraught cab driver with a pneumothorax, a gunshot victim who cared more about her dog than her wounds, and a nice man who was falling apart because of chronic hypertension. The show featured credible interactions among nurses and physicians, in clinical and social contexts, showing that nurses are sentient three-dimensional beings. The season also included nurse Kelly, a skilled, flawed younger nurse who resembled Jackie in some ways and was the strong male nurse that the show was missing in the second season. And we got periodic looks at the contempt that many people have for nursing, as well as wry commentary on the nursing image, from a patient's mockery of nurse Zoey's patterned scrubs to a more nuanced critique of Nurses Week, which went well beyond Jackie's "patronizing" comment. Yet the show repeatedly suggested that nurses "assist" physicians and that physicians control nurses' patient assignments, with emergency physician Eleanor O'Hara removing nurses from one case and putting them on another. Charge nurses or nurse managers do that in real life. Here, the closest thing to a nurse manager is Gloria Akalitus, a composite administrator who is a nurse but whose ill-defined authority seems to extend to the pharmacy and even medicine, to some extent. Despite its problems, though, Nurse Jackie shows us a world in which nurses are life-saving professionals, in stark contrast to the "yes, doctor!" model that prevails on U.S. television. more...and see the film clips!
June 7, 2010 -- The second season of Showtime's Nurse Jackie continued to offer the most thoughtful and persuasive treatment of nursing issues on U.S. television. The season also featured more of emergency nurse Jackie Peyton's drug abuse, adultery, and webs of deceit. However, as always, Jackie's issues are not nursing stereotypes, but the troubles of one complex individual. As the season approached tonight's finale, Jackie and her protÃgà Zoey Barkow continued to display clinical prowess. Jackie skillfully worked the system to help a despairing lymphoma patient find some relief from his debilitating nausea and to provide some expert, if unpleasant, advice to an ex-football star with early onset dementia. Meanwhile, Zoey saved a boy's life by intubating and resuscitating him, and saved another patient by picking up on a blood clot that could easily have led to a pulmonary embolism, something the arrogant but marginal physician Fitch Cooper missed. The show's final episodes also included a somewhat ambiguous take on men in nursing. Nurse Sam is shown to be a fairly cool, perceptive individual with an attractive girlfriend, but she breaks up with Sam after sleeping with Cooper, saying she is doing so because Sam is a nurse. Sam proceeds to break Cooper's nose. This could be interpreted as a frank examination or even subversion of anti-male nurse bias, a reinforcement of that bias, or all of the above. More troubling were the show's confused messages about nursing authority. Several plotlines had Cooper wrongly asserting that he was in charge of and could even fire nurses, with no direct rebuttal. Cooper did more than once end up in nurse manager Gloria Akalitus's office seeking to have her discipline nurses, with little success, which at least suggested that he could not take a significant adverse employment action on his own. But why can't some character just state that although nurses do have less power, they do not report to physicians because they practice a distinct, autonomous profession? In any case, the show still provides U.S. television's most compelling account of the value of nursing, and it does not hurt that the show's dramatic quality remains higher than that of any other hospital show. We thank those responsible for the show. more...
March 29, 2010 -- Tonight's episode of Showtime's Nurse Jackie included a cautionary tale about how easily a clinician as aggressively gifted as Jackie can slip into arrogance and corner-cutting. No one will likely suffer physical damage as a result of Jackie's error here (unwittingly giving a distressed family a few hours of false re-assurance about whether their child has cystic fibrosis) and the episode also includes examples of the veteran nurse's physiological and psychosocial skills. Jackie takes responsibility for the error, and it actually makes the overall portrayal of her expertise more balanced and realistic; it's not just brilliant physicians who can fall into the ego trap. Unfortunately, the episode also includes a brief reinforcement of the previous episode's suggestion that hospital physicians have some kind of direct authority over nurses. This week, nurse manager Gloria Akalitus tells Jackie that physician Cooper has lodged a "formal complaint" against her for "insubordination and general bitchiness." Jackie dismisses the complaint with a string of expletives, and Akalitus doesn't seem to care about it. But the episode does not clearly refute the idea that a physician might legitimately complain about a nurse's insubordination. Nor does it refute the implication nurses really do, in some sense, report to physicians. They don't, and suggestions that they do feed the handmaiden stereotype that has plagued nursing for decades. However, the episode still shows viewers that nurses are skilled clinicians with some autonomy who play a leading role in patient care. The episode, "Twitter," was written by Mark Hudis. more...
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