Happy 4th of July, everyone! It’s time for everyone on my side of The Hypermodern to celebrate Independence Day and all things American. And there’s nothing more American than the American Dream: the belief that the freedoms and opportunities in the United States allow anyone who works hard enough to forge for themselves a “better, richer, happier life.” But there are caveats—there are always caveats—and as always the chorus of television is here to tell us about them.

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The Declaration of Independence speaks of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; if you have a tenuous grasp on the first, it’s difficult to make any headway on the other two. Millions of Americans deal with this daily, as the systemic dysfunction in the health care system of the United States keeps many people trapped in a desperate struggle to avoid falling into the unwashed masses of the uninsured. Elizabeth Warren, head of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel, has shown that increases in certain expenses—health care being one of the top five—have eaten up most of the extra income from women entering the workforce and the overall nominal rise in wages. This means that most families today are, on average, no better off than families of half a century ago. Medical debt accounts for three out of every five personal bankruptcies in the U.S., and almost fifty million Americans do not have health insurance.

And yet every time there is agitation for a universal health care program, conservative legislators sound the cry of “Socialism!” while sucking from the teat of the insurance lobbies, conveniently downplaying their own taxpayer-funded Congressional health care plan. They ask us if we want a government bureaucrat standing between us and our doctors when an unaccountable wall of corporate bureaucracy already stands between us and them. In the meanwhile, minor ailments left untreated blossom into major medical emergencies, and the small expense of preventative care is replaced with the gargantuan costs of emergency treatment and unemployment.

The new Showtime half-hour Nurse Jackie reminds us of the perilous nature of our own well-being, asking us right off the bat: “Q: What do you call a nurse with a bad back? A: Unemployed.” That question comes from the titular Jackie (Edie Falco), who sees cases that remind her (and us) of the callous indifference of the world. A pregnant mother is left without options after her boyfriend, the breadwinner, dies on the table from a doctor’s incompetence. A prostitute is brutally knifed by a diplomat who avoids prosecution thanks to his immunity. Jackie attempts to assuage both problems by stealing the diplomat’s cash and giving it to the mother, but it’s obvious that it is only a tiny, temporary help. And as a nurse, that’s all Jackie can do: small fixes on insurmountable challenges. Jackie works eighty hour weeks and ends up almost killing a patient due to a fatigue-related mistake after a double shift; she is giving everything to stem the tide of pain and suffering coming her way.

Edie Falco carries this show; her performance is finely balanced and enigmatic. It’s acerbic without being alienating, and she definitely shows that this character has layers we’ve yet to see. A character tells her, “You’re a saint,” and it’s obvious she cares deeply for her patients. Yet Jackie has no compunctions about lying, stealing, and breaking the rules if she thinks it’s needed; she sleeps with the hospital pharmacist (Paul Schulze) in order to score painkillers for her own dependency. The show takes a page out of Mad Men at the end of the pilot by showing Jackie returning to her bungalow of a home (positioned right by a “Dead End” street sign) to a loving husband and two kids; seeing this, we get the sense that the show wants to say something, but it wants to wait a while before telling us what that is. Some audience members may not want to wait, which would be a shame as this show is a finely tuned character piece.

Of special note is the show’s design and visuals: the dark claustrophobic spaces and labyrinthine hallways of the hospital conjure the image that all the characters are rats running around in a maze. The mood it elicits is one of fatigue and desperation, of characters struggling just to make it through the day. Jackie’s nursing trainee (Merritt Wever) muses on whether the potential suffering in the world is finite or infinite. The American Dream tells us the first; what we often see tells us otherwise.

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America is a car country, there’s no doubt about it. We like to think we invented the automobile (we didn’t), we like to think we make the best automobiles (we don’t), we like to think that our auto industry will always be here (it remains to be seen). Because of our mythologizing of the automobile, it’s easy to read that industry as an allegory for ourselves: the exponential increase of unsustainable consumption and pollution, and forsaking the honest and real work of manufacturing for the chase of illusory and hollow wealth. After all, until General Motors sold off its GMAC division in 2006, it made far more money financing and insuring cars than it did from making them.  If America is car country, Detroit is our car city—and that city has seen better days.

A generation of middle-class Americans, spurred on by racial blockbusting and white flight, abandoned Detroit to the urban poor and yet had the unmitigated gall to complain that the crime-ridden economic sinkhole was such a drain on the state that the man willing to govern the city was so corrupt he ordered the police to assassinate a stripper he had hired for a private party.  Whole sectors of the city look like a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and the Michigan Theater (gutted and converted into a parking garage) is emblematic of the city’s decline. So it’s fitting that a show touching on the American Dream is set in Motown. And it’s doubly fitting that the current status of that Dream is a man pitching a tent outside the burnt-out husk of his house after his wife and kids abandon him, driven to use the only thing he’s got left: his enormous dick.

Hung is a new offering from HBO starring Thomas Jayne as a character somewhat in between his previous turns as The Punisher and Homeless Dad (“I just want my kids back!”) Jayne plays Ray Drecker, a down-on-his-luck high school teacher/basketball coach who “makes more than a waiter but less than a plumber.” The fire that claims his home also forces him to get a second job; a motivational seminar that asks him to discover his “one winning tool” leads him to the decision to become a male prostitute.

Hung bears some similarities to Breaking Bad, another show about an over-the-hill teacher pursuing an illicit profession to keep his head above water. Like that show, the main character is confronted with how the reality of his life fails to match his aspirations. Ray tells himself “I used to be going somewhere… now all I ever seem to do is try not to drown.” And like Breaking Bad, Hung has a definite focus on process; to justify the concept we need to see the steps that take Ray to the place where the decision to become a gigolo is a plausible one. In the entire pilot, we don’t even see him actually sleep with a client—it’s all about the buildup. For audiences, “How?” is becoming just as important a question as “Why?”; when confronted with events outside our control, we have a need to know how those events came about. How did we get bogged down in a war in Iraq? How did we let our economy collapse?

But this show is certainly not as dark as Breaking Bad; the “How?” of this show lends itself to a lot of humorous moments, such as Ray typing “How to make money with a large penis” into a search engine. Thomas Jayne is ably supported by Jane Adams as Tanya, a struggling poet who worms her way into becoming Ray’s pimp, and Anne Heche as Jessica, Ray’s “shallow but not really” ex-wife. But like Nurse Jackie, this is a show that rests entirely on the shoulders of its star. Jayne treads a fine line between melodramatic sap and cartoonish caricature, but he manages to find the humanity of his character and give us someone we can actually care about. It helps that he’s given a fine script to work with, penned by the husband-and-wife team of Dmitry Lipkin and Collette Burson. The pilot is brisk as a comedy should be, and sharply written. The only part that bumps for me is a blatant reference to The Great Gatsby that seems a bit on-the-nose.

But I understand where the impulse for that reference comes from. Lipkin and Burson’s previous show The Riches had the theme that the value of wealth and class was all an illusion; the gamesmanship of the upper class is all about lying to each other, so if you lie well enough, you can be one of them. Success is all about “fake it ’til you make it,” and that is something that comes back in Hung. When Ray is rejected by his first client, Tanya tells him that he has to create a character that will appeal to a woman and make her want to hire him. He has to a create a persona in order to succeed: “There are so many different ways to sell yourself,” he tells him. Loaded words, to be sure.