House is a medical drama which airs on Fox. It follows Dr. Gregory House and his team who specialize in diagnostics, that is they try to find out what is wrong with patients when other doctors can't. The main character, Greg House, is abrasive, rude, and unethical as well as a drug addict. Despite his many faults, he is adored by his colleagues because of the fact that he is a genius.
Last year, Showtime aired a show called Nurse Jackie. Jackie, in many ways, is very similar to House but at the same time she is also different. Jackie is blunt and even sometimes rude to people. Both doctors are riddled with emotional problems and use drugs in order to cope with it. Jackie, like House, bends the rules in order to do what is best for her patients. House, unlike Jackie, thinks of his patients as a puzzle that he needs to solve rather than as human beings that need to be saved. Jackie is more emotionally attached to her patients.
I think it’s interesting how these characters have so many similarities. House has obviously has been around longer, six seasons to Nurse Jackie’s one. Why is it that a show about a male doctor with drug and personality issues would come out before one about a woman? And is there a reason that House is aired on Fox, a huge network station, while Nurse Jackie is on Showtime? Also, why do you think Dr. House, a man, is portrayed as a cold man who shows no true concern about his patients while Jackie, a woman, often lets her feelings get in the way? What does this say about how we perceive men and women?
Is it possible that Nurse Jackie is breaking cultural taboos? There hasn’t been a medical show whose main character is female. Like Cullen explains in his chapter on television about how a show can be both progressive and conservative at the same time. I think that Nurse Jackie is progressive in that its main character is a strong-minded woman. At the same time, Jackie is a nurse, a profession known for being predominately female.
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