From the network that brought you Dexter!
Nurse Jackie features another outsider in hiding, if not another fiendishly clever, nudge-wink title sequence. Edie Falco (The Sopranos), sporting a sexy haircut and well-cut scrubs plays Jackie, a tough and tender nurse at a busy New York hospital with the requisite complicated personal life, which very rarely involves dismembered corpses. The city and the hospital with its ever-present religious iconography as much a character in the show as Jackie herself, juxtaposed with her complex morality.
Nurse Jackie aims to shock the viewer with its subversion of the now traditional view of nursing as a saintly, heroic profession, as opposed to the slatternly, slovenly drunks of popular consciousness pre-Florence Nightingale and her lamp. Jackie falls somewhere between the two, with an intelligent bolshieness to boot. More importantly, it also subverts the unsavoury ‘disease of the week’ goggle-eyed freak show aspect of most medical dramas, and leaves out the ridiculous, shiny surgical soft-soap that is Grey’s Anatomy: Nurse Jackie is emphatically not a medical drama, rather a human drama that happens to be set in a hospital.
Jackie’s a pathologically secretive creature of diametric opposites in a way that sometimes feels too deliberate and her drug habit invites comparisons to House, but where House’s character takes pleasure in flouting the rules for kicks to relieve his misery, Jackie does so just enough, out of a cavalier Robin-Hood moral code, as demonstrated by her forgery of an organ donor card. But, the world Jackie inhabits doesn’t allow for a keen sense of justice, and the act comes back to bite.
Jackie’s relationships are well observed, especially with her elegant, dry best friend, the fabulous Dr. O’Hara (Eve Best). Excellent too are fellow nurse Mohamed (Haaz Sleiman) and his boyfriend troubles, even the graceless and cocky Dr. Fitch ‘please call me Coop’ Cooper (an endearing performance from Peter Facinelli). Beneath the rampant libido, the tics and twitches, his character has occasional flashes of brilliance, compassion or seriousness; teasing the viewer with the possibility that he might not be the smiling idiot he appears just before the script yanks hope out from underneath us.
Jackie runs rings around Cooper, the patients, the deliciously bullish and inept hospital manager Gloria Akalitus (Anna Deveare Smith, in a rare comic role that occasionally veers into cartoonish silliness), her dozy, well meaning trainee Zoey (Merrit Wever, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip), and her pharmacist lover Eddie (Paul Schulze, an actor with a long list of TV credits). Jackie should be unappealing, given her constant deception and manipulation of those around her, like her sweet, sanguine and underdeveloped husband, but the writing and Falco’s hints at vulnerability make her compelling.
Nurse Jackie also flirts with one of the most peculiar archetypes in US drama, the Mom, a figure canonized in American popular culture, who even if recovering from last night’s coke-and-booze binge is always ready to make a nutritionally balanced breakfast for her neatly turned out, fussed over little ones, or attend that crucial soccer/baseball/basketball match. Jackie’s relationships with her daughters are troubled; she freely admits struggling to understand them.
Nurse Jackie manages to pack more incident, pathos and dark humour in half hour chunks than most popular dramas manage in double the time, by careful management of the intersecting story threads and exposition-light scripting and tart, tannic one-liners.
The first season ends with not with a bang, but a trippy, medicated whimper, just as Jackie’s careful juggling is set to come crashing about her ears, but with the viewer willing it all to come right for her and knowing it is unlikely to, given Nurse Jackie’s reluctance to settle for a happy ending.
