Nadine Hurley, played by Wendy Robie, is married to Big Ed and is well known in the town for her ferocity and eccentricity. Nadine wears a patch over her left eye, having lost it in a hunting accident on their honeymoon. Ed's guilt over the accident (and other things) is perhaps all that holds together their mostly unhappy marriage, as he would rather have married Norma Jennings, his high-school sweetheart.

Nadine spends the first few episodes of the series attempting to create the world's first completely silent drape-runners. She is successful when her husband, Ed, accidentally spills mechanical grease on the cotton balls she is fixing to the runners. Nadine initially thinks this will make them both very rich but alas it does not, because not many people care about silent drape-runners.

After trying to commit suicide at the end of the first season (by overdosing on a mixture of pills), Nadine awakes from the resulting coma believing herself to be a teenager in high school and, incidentally, just dating her husband. Her superhuman strength (already present in season one) allows her to enter the school's wrestling team—the first female to do so. Though the cause of her strength and her memory loss is left largely to the viewer's imagination, adrenaline is circuitously mentioned at one point by Dr. Hayward, as well as is Dr. Jacoby's comment that "that tissue's packed in there pretty hard".

As season two progresses, Nadine and Ed decide to "break up", and she begins pursuit of teenage Mike Nelson (captain of the Twin Peaks wrestling team). This in turn leaves Ed free to pursue Norma.

In the final episode, Nadine suffers a blow to the head that results in the simultaneous loss of her strength[citation needed] and her delusions of teenhood. Apparently, she has no memory of anything that has occurred since her suicide attempt. The full repercussions of her recovery, including the potential scuppering of Big Ed's and Norma's newly-announced marriage plans, were left to be addressed in a third season that was never to be.