I’ve been watching Showtime’s Nurse Jackie all morning, with a vague plan to write about how funny it is, how dark and how provocative, Edie Falco’s sheer talent, the quirky set of supporting characters, etc. etc. All of these things are true. After watching six episodes, though, I come away not with a sense of pleasure in great television, but rather with a feeling of being buried in a fine grey dust that I’m having a hard time brushing away.

It’s a frustrating sensation, and one that I’m sure has at least partially to do with my preference for watching many episodes of something at once instead of once a week. Once a week, maybe the deep underlying pulse of despair in Nurse Jackie wouldn’t be quite so exhausting. There are quite a few sources of humor in the show, including the nearly unbearable awkwardness of Jackie’s young nursing student, the casually cruel bedside manner of Jackie’s painfully well-dressed doctor friend, and another young male doctor who has a habit of grabbing Jackie’s breasts when he gets nervous. But these side characters fail to puncture the enveloping miasma of quotidian bleakness, and instead provide new angles of perspective on the gloom.

Every day, Jackie copes with patients who are either too helpless, ill, or misguided to be healed. She loves her husband and her daughters, but maintains an affair with the hospital pharmacist to keep herself supplied with heavy-duty painkillers.¹ Jackie doesn’t actually dislike her husband or the pharmacist, but uses them as escapes from each other, just like she uses the painkillers to escape from her brutal job. When Falco played Carmella on The Sopranos, there was a similar sense of inevitable failure and sadness, but Carmella and Tony’s world was punctuated by frequent violent outbursts, screaming matches, glasses thrown against walls, and fits of weeping. Come the apocalypse, Carmella knew where the AK-47 was hidden. Jackie has no access to that kind of power, so she seeks only to dull the pain she can never fully exorcise. When she does act out against the Powers That Be, they are fits of secret rebellion, disguised and denied from everyone else. In the pilot, she flushes a rapists’ ear down a toilet and then blames it on her student. But like the attempts at humor from the supporting characters, Jackie’s moments of sticking it to The Man merely illustrate more clearly that The Man could care less.

The scene that really brings this home for me is in episode four, “School Nurse,” when Jackie and her husband Kevin are called in to their daughter’s school because her teachers suspect Grace has an anxiety disorder. The school’s nurse asks Jackie and Kevin to examine one of Grace’s drawings, and neither parent sees anything wrong – it’s an image of their family, standing in front of the bar Kevin owns. The district psychologist finally points out that the picture is done completely in browns and greys, with no blue sky or giant yellow sun. Of course, Jackie can’t see the problem and refuses to believe anything’s wrong until later, when a boy whose brother almost dies draws her colleague a picture full of smiling faces and a brilliant round sun. Grace’s picture, her unsmiling family in browns and greys? That’s Nurse Jackie.

It’s not a subtle point (for me or for the show), but it does the job. I’m not against depressing shows – I love The Sopranos and The Wire and those episodes of Frontline that leave you wondering how any of us are still alive. But unlike any of those shows, Nurse Jackie is one woman’s life in episodes half as long; they are briefer, more concentrated bursts of misery without a breadth of scope to anchor them. I will keep watching, because it’s summer and Dostoyevsky’s always better than Twilight, but I am now limiting myself to one episode a week. For my own mental safety.

¹ The first episode works much like the first episode of Mad Men, where Don Draper’s bad behavior is capped at the very end by his return home to his Norman Rockwell family. Jackie has sex with Eddie the pharmacist, snorts pain meds, and walks all over a student nurse, and the reveal of her loving husband and gorgeous daughters at the end of the episode functions as a surprise twist.