Crawling with dead/dying patients, worried/grieving relatives and physically/emotionally exhausted employees, hospitals aren’t exactly a barrel of monkeys. As the titular character in Nurse Jackie points out to naïve new intern Zoey: “This job is wading through a shitstorm of people on the very worst day of their lives.”
Yet Nurse Jackie, like a curiously high number of hospital shows before it, bills itself as a comedy — a black one, but still.
Equally surprising is the ease in which star Edie Falco has thrown off Carmela Soprano’s diamond-encrusted shackles. Sure, it helps that Falco hacked her hair into a no-nonsense butch-dyke ’do, our first glimpse of her is mid–snorting of OxyContin and almost all her screen time is spent in scrubs. But those superficial alterations are ultimately less important than her high-level acting skills. She has created such a lived-in new character that Jackie doesn’t even hint at Falco’s mafia-wife past, despite her new character shagging a pharmacist played by Paul Schulze, best-known as her Sopranos almost–love interest Father Phil.
The show itself is more formulaic. Jackie Peyton is essentially House with boobs, complete with painkiller addiction, underappreciated smarts and barbed quips.
The early episodes make her seem like even more of a misanthrope. After spending her 80-hour work weeks battling cocky doctors, doing drugs, forging organ donor cards and having nooners in the pill closet, she then heads home to her cute kids and adorable husband (Dominic Fumusa). “I made pancakes for dinner,” he grins goofily. “Isn’t that the best?” Well, yes… and therefore, isn’t Jackie the worst?
Despite her repeated (and sometimes vigilante) life-saving in the ER, Jackie comes off more sinner than saint. And while her philandering and addictions are refreshing in a female character, they’re not exactly, y’know, funny.
There is some gallows humour — appropriate for maintaining sanity in a New York City emergency room. But despite its half-hour length and needle-pun tagline (“Life is full of little pricks”) Jackie isn’t a light-hearted sitcom like the wacky, and seemingly unkillable, Scrubs or Elliott Gould’s ’80s-era E/R. Nor is it a meaningful dramatic comedy like M*A*S*H.
Without either hospital hijinks or an over-arching story this character-based series threatens to devolve into familiar patients-of-the-week plots. Hell, they’ve already done two crotch cases: scrotum mauled by cat and bottle-rocket shot out of ass.
Nurse Jackie was immediately renewed for a second season, so maybe that will give the creators enough confidence to make the show feel just as vital as Falco’s performance.
Nurse Jackie airs Mondays, 10pm on TMN