How Television Has Portrayed the Users, Dealers and Communities Caught in America’s Drug Cycle
Television shows about drug addiction have approached the devastation of substance abuse from nearly every imaginable angle, showing us the people who get high, the people who sell the drugs and the families, friends and communities left to absorb the consequences.
Recently, while binge-watching Nurse Jackie, I found myself thinking less about the pills Jackie Peyton was taking and more about what she was willing to do to keep taking them.
Lie to her husband. Manipulate her friends. Betray her coworkers. Steal. Deceive. Hurt people who genuinely love her.
And then walk into a patient’s room and be an extraordinary nurse.
I’ve been binge-watching Nurse Jackie, and somewhere along the way I realized how much I disliked Jackie Peyton.
Not Edie Falco’s performance, which is fearless. Jackie.
There are moments when you want somebody, anybody, to finally stop believing her.
She lies to her husband. Manipulates her friends. Uses Eddie and his feelings for her to maintain access to pills. She steals. She betrays people who repeatedly extend their hands to help her. And just when you think getting caught might finally force her to confront what she’s doing, Jackie finds another lie.
Then a patient needs her.
And she’s brilliant.
That’s what makes watching Nurse Jackie so maddening.
Jackie can walk out of a room after doing something breathtakingly selfish and into another where she’s the most compassionate, capable person in the hospital. Her addiction doesn’t erase the qualities that make people love her. Those qualities help her addiction survive.
Watching Jackie sent me back mentally to Rue Bennett, Christopher Moltisanti, Bubbles, Wanda Bell and Jesse Pinkman, and to Franklin Saint and Walter White on the other side of the transaction.
Television has been mining stories about drugs for decades, and some of its greatest series have found gold there. The Sopranos. The Wire. Breaking Bad. More recently, Snowfall, Euphoria and Dopesick have approached the same subject from entirely different directions.
There’s a reason writers keep returning.
The best television shows about drug addiction use that dependency not merely as a plot device, but as a way to expose character, relationships and the limits of what people will sacrifice for themselves or someone they love.
Drugs provide the match.
People provide the gasoline.
Addiction can turn love into suspicion, loyalty into exhaustion and survival into something ugly. The business of drugs introduces another set of temptations: money, power, status and the ability to distance yourself from whoever eventually consumes what you’re selling.
And television gives writers something movies rarely have enough of.
Time.
We don’t simply meet these characters at rock bottom.
We remember them before they got there.
Nurse Jackie and Euphoria | When Loving Someone Isn’t Enough
Jackie Peyton and Rue Bennett couldn’t look more different on paper.
Jackie is an accomplished nurse with a husband, children and a career. Rue is a teenager who can barely imagine a future beyond getting through the next day.
But put their families in a room together and they would recognize each other immediately.
They know the lies.
They know the promises.
They know the search for missing pills, missing money and missing pieces of the truth.
They know what it feels like to desperately want to believe someone when experience has taught you not to.
Nurse Jackie makes its central character infuriating because Jackie is so damn good at manipulating people. Her intelligence, which makes her an exceptional nurse, also makes her an exceptional addict. She reads people. She knows what they need to hear. She understands how much truth to mix into a lie.
And everyone around her slowly changes because of it.
Trust becomes suspicion.
Help becomes enabling.
Love begins requiring boundaries.
Euphoria removes much of Jackie’s finesse.
When Rue needs drugs, the need can swallow everything else.
The infamous confrontation with Leslie and Gia is difficult to watch precisely because Rue becomes vicious toward the people who love her most. There is no glamorous haze around addiction in those moments. There’s screaming, desperation and a family being emotionally ripped apart.
Gia is particularly heartbreaking because she doesn’t get to choose any of this.
She’s simply Rue’s little sister.
Yet addiction occupies their home so completely that Gia’s childhood has to make room for it.
That’s what both shows understand.
The person getting high isn’t necessarily the only person whose life gets rearranged around the drug.
The Sopranos | Getting Clean and Going Back to the Same People
Christopher Moltisanti’s intervention might be one of the funniest interventions ever put on television.
It’s also horrifying.
What begins as an attempt to confront Christopher about his heroin addiction quickly degenerates into insults, grievances and violence because, of course, these are mobsters trying to conduct group therapy.
But the comedy obscures something painfully true.
Everyone knows Christopher has a problem.
Almost nobody around him knows how to help.
Christopher eventually goes to rehab. He gets sober. Then he comes home to people who drink around him, mock aspects of his recovery and expect him to slide seamlessly back into the same violent life he occupied before treatment.
Christopher isn’t innocent.
He’s violent, abusive, selfish and frequently cruel. Heroin didn’t create all of that.
That’s what makes his addiction more interesting dramatically.
The Sopranos doesn’t use drugs to explain Christopher away.
Instead, sobriety forces us to wonder whether another Christopher is possible.
Every so often, we see him.
Then the door closes again.
The Corner and The Wire | Down on the Corner
Long before The Wire, David Simon and Ed Burns took us to The Corner.
Long before The Wire, David Simon and Ed Burns took us to The Corner, drawing from their extensive examination of Baltimore’s drug trade and the people living inside it. The series would become a precursor to the much broader institutional portrait they later constructed in The Wire.
And there is very little distance between drugs and family there.
Gary McCullough and Fran Boyd are addicts. Their son DeAndre is growing up surrounded by the drug trade and becomes part of it.
That simple family dynamic contains almost the entire cycle.
Parents using.
A child selling.
A neighborhood feeding both.
Few television shows about drug addiction have captured that cycle with the intimacy of The Corner, while The Wire takes the same problem and expands it across an entire city.
Then The Wire takes that corner and begins connecting wires to everything around it.
The Barksdale organization.
The police.
City Hall.
The schools.
The docks.
Eventually the question isn’t simply why somebody sells drugs or why somebody gets high.
It’s what happens when the drug economy becomes stitched into the economic and institutional fabric of a city.
And through all of that complexity walks Bubbles.
Bubbles could easily have been comic relief or another anonymous junkie feeding information to police.
Instead, The Wire gives him a soul.
We watch him hustle. Scheme. Relapse. Grieve. Try again.
And we watch addiction humiliate him.
That’s an important word in these stories: humiliation.
Addiction repeatedly makes people do things they once might have considered unimaginable.
Bubbles’ story becomes especially powerful because The Wire doesn’t leave him there.
His climb back is painfully slow.
When he finally begins ascending those basement stairs into his sister’s home, that small physical movement carries the weight of everything we’ve watched him endure.
Recovery isn’t a reset button.
For Bubbles, it’s a staircase.
Snowfall | The Money and the Bodies
Franklin Saint doesn’t start Snowfall wanting to destroy his neighborhood.
He wants money.
Opportunity.
Control over his future.
That’s what makes his journey so insidious.
We understand the attraction.
Then Wanda shows us the bill.
What separates Snowfall from many television shows about drug addiction is its ability to place the person profiting from the drug and the people being destroyed by it inside the same community.
Watching Wanda fall into crack addiction is horrifying because Snowfall allows the transformation to happen over time. The person we knew begins disappearing.
Meanwhile, Franklin’s business grows.
More money.
More territory.
More power.
More bodies.
The juxtaposition becomes impossible to ignore.
Franklin’s success isn’t occurring alongside the destruction.
The destruction is financing the success.
And Franklin changes too.
He doesn’t become addicted to the product he’s selling, but protecting the empire requires its own surrender. Violence becomes easier. Paranoia becomes necessary. People become obstacles.
There’s a cruel symmetry to Snowfall.
Wanda is ravaged by consuming the product.
Franklin is ravaged by selling it.
Breaking Bad | Cooking the Poison
Walter White begins with a justification almost noble enough to believe.
He’s dying.
His family needs money.
He’s a gifted chemist.
He can cook meth.
What could possibly go wrong?
Everything.
The genius of Breaking Bad is how long it allows Walter, and perhaps the audience, to keep pretending this is still about providing for his family.
Eventually the lie becomes impossible to maintain.
Walter likes being good at this.
He likes the money.
He likes being feared.
He likes being Heisenberg.
And beside him is Jesse Pinkman.
Jesse is particularly important because he can’t maintain Walter’s emotional distance from the product.
He’s used it.
Sold it.
Cooked it.
Tried to stop using it.
Watched people die around it.
Jane’s death leaves one of the deepest scars, but it isn’t the only one.
Walter can discuss purity percentages.
Jesse keeps seeing faces.
That’s what separates them.
The farther Walter climbs, the easier it becomes for him to treat meth as an achievement.
The farther Jesse falls, the harder it becomes for him to ignore what they’re actually making.
Dopesick | A Different Kind of Corner
Then Dopesick performs a nasty little trick.
It changes the packaging.
After watching drugs move through corners and meth labs, we’re suddenly looking at prescription bottles.
The dealer has a sales presentation.
The product has FDA approval.
The transaction happens at a pharmacy.
And the person taking the drug may have started because they were injured and trusted their doctor.
The fictionalized story reflects the much larger opioid crisis that the National Institute on Drug Abuse has documented for decades, including the role prescription opioids played in the epidemic’s first wave.
That makes Dopesick deeply unsettling.
There is no Franklin Saint standing on the other side of the transaction. No Barksdale crew. No Heisenberg.
There is an institution telling people that medicine will help them.
The legal distinctions matter, but Dopesick forces us to look beyond them at something painfully familiar.
A person needs more.
Then more.
Then more.
Their behavior changes.
Their family notices.
Their work suffers.
Their life begins reorganizing itself around obtaining the drug.
And somewhere far removed from that suffering, somebody is counting revenue.
The corner looks different.
The transaction doesn’t feel nearly as different as we’d like.
The Bear | The Empty Chair
Michael Berzatto isn’t there.
That’s the point.
The Bear begins after the explosion.
Carmy comes home and inherits the restaurant, but what he really inherits is unfinished business with a dead brother.
Sugar has her version.
Richie has his.
Everyone is carrying a different Michael.
That’s what addiction can leave behind.
Questions with nobody left to answer them.
Anger with nowhere to go.
Guilt that keeps looking for somewhere to land.
Most of the shows in this conversation allow us to watch addiction damage relationships in real time.
The Bear shows us the empty chair afterward.
The Havoc
Which brings me back to Jackie.
The maddening, brilliant, selfish, compassionate, manipulative Jackie Peyton.
There are moments watching Nurse Jackie when you want her to get caught.
Not because you want her punished.
Because you want the lying to stop.
And then you realize the people around her have been waiting for exactly the same thing.
That’s where television has found such extraordinary dramatic material in drug addiction.
These stories are filled with contradictions that can’t be neatly resolved.
That’s where the greatest television shows about drug addiction find their power: not simply in depicting the high, but in forcing us to live with everything that follows it.
Rue deserves compassion and can be vicious to her family.
Christopher wants sobriety and keeps returning to a life hostile to it.
Bubbles can relapse after making you believe this time will be different.
Wanda can become almost unrecognizable.
Jesse can be both perpetrator and victim.
Franklin can love his community while helping poison it.
Walter can tell himself he’s protecting his family while systematically destroying it.
Jackie can save someone’s life in one room and devastate someone who loves her in the next.
Great television doesn’t ask us to choose between empathy and accountability.
It makes us carry both.
Maybe that’s why writers have found so much dramatic gold here.
Drug addiction naturally creates stakes, but the drugs aren’t ultimately what make these stories unforgettable.
It’s watching people change.
It’s remembering who they were.
It’s seeing the moment when someone who swore they’d never cross a particular line crosses it.
Then another.
Then another.
And it’s watching the people around them decide how many times they can forgive, rescue, believe, enable, confront or walk away.
Someone gets high.
Someone supplies the drug.
Someone makes money.
Someone promises they’re done.
Someone desperately wants to believe them.
And somewhere along the way, the damage travels far beyond the person who swallowed the pill, smoked the rock, injected the heroin or cooked the meth.
That’s the terrible truth these shows keep finding from different directions.
The high may belong to one person.
The havoc rarely does.
