In real life, of course, hospitals would grind to a halt and patients would be in serious jeopardy without the presence of nurses, who provide the bulk of bedside care. Their contribution to live-saving and healing takes training, skill, and experience—not just the kind, sweet, and caring nature long attributed to women alone. But now—better late than never—Hollywood is finally acknowledging such truths, in the form of two new shows (with one more on the way this fall) in which nurses finally take center stage. TNT’s HawthoRNe, starring Jada Pinkett-Smith, and Showtime’s Nurse Jackie, featuring Edie Falco, each premiered in June, with much media fanfare. Both have provoked vigorous debate among nurses about their relative accuracy, while the spotlight that Nurse Jackie puts on the gritty underside of hospital life is making some RNs or their organizations particularly uncomfortable.
Professional quibbles about HawthoRNe are quite understandable. Jada Pinkett Smith plays Christina Hawthorne, in a series high in saccharine content but low in verisimilitude. As chief nursing officer of “Trinity Hospital” in Richmond, Virginia, Christina is no typical nurse manager. Real nurse managers spend their days closeted in offices, poring over spread sheets, preparing budgets, and attending administrative staff meetings. In big city hospitals, many staff nurses wouldn’t recognize their CNO if she (or he) walked by in the corridor. Pinkett-Smith’s character is, by contrast, a hands-on super-nurse—feisty, indefatigable, and seemingly everywhere. She talks psych ward patients off the roof (or tries to), personally wheels accident victims into the ER, grabs the paddles from doctors when they give up on a man in cardiac arrest (the guy is, in fact, a lost cause), and, in one episode, even rescues a newborn infant from the neighborhood bag lady, who has unwittingly become a mother while living on the street. Christina’s long list of heroic interventions puts past TV-healers to shame—and the season is far from over. Unfortunately, the show’s acting is poor, its dialogue silly, its syrupy soundtrack absolutely dreadful, and its contrived dramatic situations straight out of—you guessed it—Hollywood. What’s worse, from the perspective of the nursing profession, is that it reproduces the fundamental problem of TV doctor shows, which perennially distort who really does what. In those, the doctors do all the bedside nursing. In this one, the chief nurse does the nursing. Why worry about a nursing shortage? Christina will do it for you.
The painful realism and dark comedy of Nurse Jackie is the flip side of Pinkett-Smith’s fairytale version of nursing. Just check out Showtime’s edgy promotional ads for Falco’s outer-borough alter-ego—a shot of Jackie holding up a latex gloved hand, with syringe ready to go—in the position of an extended middle finger—with the ever-so-true caption: “Life is full of little pricks.” The ex-Sopranos star takes it from there. In wry, witty, often hilarious fashion, she nails real-life nursing like no one has ever done before, amid the chaotic war zone of big city health care. In Manhattan’s “All Saints” hospital, Falco gets plenty of help from a great ensemble cast that includes Anna Deavere Smith as a far more believable hospital administrator than Hawthorne; Haiz Sleiman as a gay male nurse (the best in this genre since Jeffrey’s Wright’s unforgettable role in the HBO production of Angels in America); and Merrit Wever as a student nurse, who captures all the touching enthusiasm, on-the-job nervousness, and short-lived naiveté of the legion of young women and men now apprenticing to become RNs.