It all started with Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie). Or maybe his inspiration, Sherlock Holmes.
The high-functioning drug addict has become a bizarre staple of TV drama series. Despite the pills that go down their throats or morphine that courses through their scabby veins, they never seem to miss a beat.
Can anyone who works at a newspaper imagine getting through the day, let alone a New York City hospital, on what “Nurse Jackie” (Edie Falco) shovels into her system? It seems unlikely.
This summer saw the premiere of two series about medical professionals who, like Jackie and Dr. House (“House”) before her, have a pill problem. On USA’s “Rush,” a disgraced ER physician, Dr. William Rush (Tom Ellis), administers private care to LA’s elite — but pops pills, snorts coke and smokes weed between appointments. The show plays like “Ray Donovan” meets “House,” but if its ratings are any indication, viewers find it less-than-compelling.
On Cinemax’s “The Knick,” Dr. William Thackery (Clive Owen) has a nasty liquid cocaine habit that’s leaving track marks all over his limbs. He winds down after a busy day at Knickerbocker Hospital at a Mott Street opium den staffed with Asian lovelies.
Characters who live on the edge like these are, at first glance — or maybe during a show’s first season — fascinating. They have a big secret, a potentially fatal flaw, one that threatens to trip them up and destroy the jobs they perform, and the people around them.
Unfortunately, for a show as promising as “The Knick,” the character with the big secret and the fatal flaw is so done. So commonplace. We now have a cop with a drug problem on ABC’s “Rookie Blue,” and let’s not forget the skeevy alcoholic played by William H. Macy on “Shameless.”
The fatal flaw in these characters has become the fatal flaw in many of these shows.
To be fair to “The Knick’s” creators, Thackery is based on a real-life, pioneering surgeon, Dr. William Halsted, who also had a drug problem. That would have been provocative if we hadn’t already had Dr. House and Nurse Jackie (and “Breaking Bad” drug dealer Walter White and his cohort, Jesse Pinkman).
It’s not as if there isn’t enough melodrama at Knickerbocker Hospital. There are doctors selling the corpses they can’t save, grotesque deaths on the operating table, a scheming ambulance driver, a corrupt nun and patients with hard-to-treat illnesses, like a woman whose nose has rotted away from syphilis. With a scenario this gritty, does having a highly functioning drug addict in charge really add that much?
Perhaps TV writers are fascinated by addictive behavior because of the high rate of drug use in their own business. It’s just that the audience needs a fresh approach or a moratorium on antiheroes. Six seasons in, Nurse Jackie keeps getting into the same trouble — healing properities aside, she’s just a liar. It’s real, but it’s also old. TV has given me a curious case of antihero fatigue.