Edie Does It with Nurse Jackie; Falco Knocks Other Soaps Into Oblivion
NURSE JACKIE
SHOWTIME
THE NATIONAL POST
Edie Falco gets to say "previously on Nurse Jackie" at the start of every episode, after the first one. That seems to have become TV series stars' prerogative on every show since Kiefer Sutherland paved the way on 24. Some shows, though, take more naturally to previous lies than others. The ones on Nurse Jackie seem a little forced, because this series - a cross between a procedural drama and a sitcom - doesn't have much of a storyline. So instead of filling us in on plot, the pre-credit flashbacks have to highlight whichever psychological tics the characters will be displaying in the half-hour ahead. I've now screened the first six episodes (I'm hooked, but that's all I could get from my supplier) and I've already lost count of the number of times I've seen Peter Facinelli as the brash but insecure young Dr. Cooper grab Nurse Jackie's breast - the titular tit, perhaps - and excuse it as a physical equivalent of Tourette's syndrome. So who's he going to semi-assault this week?
I am, of course, pleased to hear Falco's voice saying anything. She's my favourite American actress, and her performance here only confirms that. Though nobody's ever going to forget that she was Carmela Soprano, the role hasn't haunted her the way that the role of Tony has haunted James Gandolfini. There are things she brings to all her roles: a crooked, occasionally dopey smile, at once tolerant and world-weary, and the mindset that goes with it. In this one, she oddly reminds me of Jon Stewart, looking aghast at something especially stupid on the news: same gestures even, as of denial through humour. A crucial difference between her Carmela and her Jackie is that Carmela had to constantly deny her own considerable intelligence. There were things she couldn't afford to admit or to think about. Jackie - in her professional life, at least - has no illusions about anything.
Jackie Peyton is a senior nurse in the ER unit at a big New York hospital, a job in which, as she tells an eager trainee, you are always meeting people on the worst day of their lives. She has a bad back. "What," she voice-overed, (a device that seems, unfortunately, to have been dropped since the pilot) "do you call a nurse with back pain? Unemployed." So she keeps it a secret and sneaks medication for it - and, of course, has to keep that a secret, too.
A medical show that concentrates on nurses rather than doctors has a chance to strip off the glamour, and that's the obvious intention of this one. "Doctors diagnose," Jackie says, "we heal," and she functions as an unsanctioned and unsentimental patients' advocate, cutting every piece of red tape she can get away with. So she has contempt for Dr. Cooper, wet behind the ears, whose first action on the show is to let a patient die, and whose war-whoops around the ward when he does get something right strain credulity even on a TV show. Her best friend, though, is another doctor, Eleanor O'Hara, whose name may be Irish but whose manner is wonderfully, offhandedly English. She's played by Eve Best, a major player in the British theatre, and one of the treats of the show is watching two towering actresses (Best is very tall) striking sparks off one another. "You do care, really," Jackie says; "No," Eleanor says cheerfully. "Don't think so." She's treating Jackie to a four-star meal at the time, something she seems to do on a regular basis. She's also a shopaholic. Jackie seems surprisingly unresentful of the financial gulf between them; also, Eleanor needs her. She calls for "Jacks" whenever a case threatens to turn emotional.
Other regulars include Mohammed (Haaz Sleiman), a male nurse who has yet to transcend the role of the heroine's gay confidant; Mrs. Akalaitis (Anna Deavere Smith), a battleaxe supervisor who's probably well observed but whose appearances I find myself dreading as much as the other characters do; and Zoey (Merritt Wever) the trainee, who refers to herself as Jackie's "protege" and is lovely. And there's Eddie, the hospital pharmacist, who slips Jackie her drugs and is also her lover, or perhaps more precisely her f---buddy, every day at noon, sharp. Eddie is played by the protean Paul Schulze, a CTU boss on 24, a hobo on Mad Men and - of most immediate relevance - Father Phil, the priest Carmela unavailingly fancied on The Sopranos. Good to see them consummating that passion at last.
What Eddie doesn't know - what, apparently and incredibly, almost nobody at the hospital knows - is that Jackie is married. We didn't know it until the last moments of the pilot when we were introduced, the surprises sprung in careful sequence, first to Jackie's two little girls, then to her husband. He seems very nice. What developing plot there is centres on their elder daughter being diagnosed with depression, brought on by watching the news and (we assume) by her mother's job. One other thing Jackie shares with Carmela: she's a Catholic, theoretically lapsed but still capable, in the pilot, of quoting Augustine ( "make me good but not yet") and also T. S. Eliot, taught to her by the nuns. This is another angle the show seems, sadly, to have dropped. And there still hasn't been another moment to match the one at the pilot's end when Jackie, having watched a bike messenger die on the table, advised another one to take care, got sworn at and promptly punctured his tire. That was Jackie in one enchanting nutshell.
I guess "procedurals" are true to life; most work-lives are repetitive which, in TV terms, means reassuring. It's still depressing to see cable TV retreating into this territory, away from the long-form serial and the scarce-remembered single play. That's the dark view. The light is to compare this show to the medical soaps on the networks. It knocks them into oblivion. Unlike House, it doesn't wallow in its protagonist's adorable misanthropy. Like Jackie, it has a job to do and - in a smart, funny and sexy way - gets on with it.