The new Showtime series “Nurse Jackie,” which begins on Monday, June 8th, after the première of the fifth season of “Weeds,” marks the welcome return to TV of Edie Falco, starring as Jackie Peyton, an emergency-room nurse in a New York City hospital. You may remember Falco: she played the wife of a prosperous Italian-American in a long-running HBO drama. Whenever I saw Falco on talk shows during the eight-year run of “The Sopranos,” she was surprisingly ill-humored in response to good-humored questions from the hosts about her fans’ conflation of her with her character Carmela Soprano; she had no interest even in discussing the phenomenon, since, she said, it had nothing to do with her or with the work of acting. That kind of severity can be disappointing when you’re watching someone on a talk show, failing to play along, but it’s also refreshing and may, in fact, say something about the nature of Falco’s talent. Actors have to be willing to burst fans’ bubbles in order to move on; and fans have to let them do it.
Amazingly, as you watch “Nurse Jackie,” even as you’re seeing that familiar face and hearing that familiar tangy voice, your mind does release Falco from the Carmela associations, partly because she brings the same skills to the new role, making Jackie seem just as real as Carmela did. In both shows, Falco has had to convey the heated internal struggles of someone with a strong personality whose role in life—Mob boss’s wife, high-level nurse—requires her to both go along with and find ways to get around the built-in limits of her power. Falco is so good in “Nurse Jackie” that she may have to become annoyed all over again, when talk-show hosts ask her whether fans think she’s an R.N. and want her to take care of them.
One thing we learn about Jackie right away is that she uses drugs to get through the day. She tells us this in a voice-over that opens the first episode; as we hear the theme song from “Valley of the Dolls” and watch, in a slow-motion, extreme-closeup sequence, pretty red pellets liberated from a capsule raining downward like some kind of dream-world candy, Jackie says, “Sixteen grains—no more, no less,” adding, with self-conscious cheer, as if she were doing a TV commercial, “Just a little bump to get me up and running.” She’s sardonic and in control, briskly lining up the pellets with the edge of her hospital I.D. card and unceremoniously snorting them. The dopiness (literal and figurative) of the sequence gives way to the hecticness of the hospital—a bike messenger is rushed in on a stretcher after an accident, and the E.R. doctor, Fitch Cooper (Peter Facinelli, who might as well be called John Carter here, so uncannily does he resemble “E.R.” ’s Noah Wyle), disagrees with her recommended course of action. What follows is an illustration of something all nurses (and doctors and patients) know: there are times when the nurse gets it right and the doctor gets it wrong, and the outcome is dire. But the scene does more than establish that “Nurse Jackie,” which was created by Evan Dunsky, Liz Brixius, and Linda Wallem, “understands” nurses; it shows you all the little steps in the dance, the microdynamics of these intense situations involving life, death, and hierarchy (the three certainties of hospitals). Jackie’s doing everything that needs to be done, and the patient is feeling cared for, but Dr. Cooper shoulders her aside without acknowledging it, and then bungles an attempt to help the patient sit up better. But the patient doesn’t register any of this; the second the doctor walks into the room, Jackie becomes invisible.
Such moments aren’t lingered over; the show, a well-paced half hour, moves along in the same way that Jackie’s non-stop busy day does. The patient dies, and after doing a certain amount of agonizing Jackie rips the doctor apart for his failure to pay proper attention. Later still, deliberately but not showily, she pulls him aside to tell him that he’s a good doctor and that he should jettison all the jokey and jerky maneuvers he uses to cover up his insecurity. This time, he listens. Jackie, in any event, finds a way to resolve her regret at not having tried harder to override Dr. Cooper, imposing a sort of vigilante justice behind the scenes. She has a habit of throwing the ethical rule book away, and the cascade of consequences is hugely entertaining and often unexpectedly funny—unless, that is, you’re the woman-beating thug whose severed ear finds its way into her hands.
In addition to her routine work, Jackie is, on the day we meet her, given a first-year nursing student to supervise, a nervous, enthusiastic, talkative puppy named Zoey (Merritt Wever). Jackie wastes no time putting her in her place. After telling her point-blank to shut up, she says, “I don’t like chatty. O.K.? I don’t do chatty. I like quiet. Quiet and mean—those are my people.” She also has to deal with her irritatingly punctilious administrator, Gloria Akalitus (Anna Deavere Smith). And she has to make time for her regular sex break with Eddie (Paul Schulze), the hospital pharmacist, who provides her with Oxycontin. And then there’s lunch with her friend Eleanor O’Hara (Eve Best), a doctor at the hospital, who is meant to be Jackie’s best friend. The bond is apparently based on their supreme competence, but that accounts only for a lack of contempt, not for the presence of affection. No matter how eager the creators of the show were to bust through the stereotype of doctors and nurses being at each other’s throats (or in each other’s scrubs), the friendship isn’t plausible. Dr. O’Hara is an over-the-top shopper and egomaniac, with a parodic English accent (Best is English, playing “English”), and says things like “Swear to God, Jacks, the salespeople at Bergdorf are so foul they almost make me regret spending twelve hundred dollars on a scarf.” The Jackie we’ve come to know by now—this line occurs in the third episode—would crush Dr. O’Hara up and toss her in the biohazard bin, or at least make fun of her for sounding as though she were auditioning for a show called “Ab Fab, M.D.” (In other stereotype news, the two male nurses on the show are both gay.) The women do have one small scene together that is piercingly brilliant—sitting on a bench in a side corridor, getting ready to leave, they are talking about shoe sizes, when they hear a patient shrieking in agony and look down the hall to see her being wheeled along on her way to wherever. They have no expression on their faces, and within seconds they turn back to their own concerns. Jackie scratches her nose and says, “I need to eat something.” “Me, too,” Dr. O’Hara says. They’re off duty, after all, a state of being that we resist thinking about when it comes to doctors and nurses, because it means that they love us only until their shift is over. Watching this throwaway scene feels like being punched in the stomach by God while your mother holds you down—it’s existential humor at its finest.
With each episode, Jackie’s relationship to drugs becomes a little clearer, and we realize that, as smart as she is, as good a nurse as she is, she’s kidding herself, to some extent, about her addiction. She would call it self-medicating, as needed; we would call it dependency. What isn’t clear—just as it shouldn’t be, at least not yet—is what her drug use is all “about.” She seems to need to abuse some substance in order to deal with every aspect of her life—something for midmorning, something for midafternoon, and something “for the long ride home”—even though her life doesn’t appear to be going too badly. She’s good at her job; she has two daughters she adores; her husband, Kevin (Dominic Fumusa), owns a bar and loves his family. A closer look reveals seams. Jackie takes her wedding ring off before going to work; the sex with Eddie is joyless and might as well be anonymous, since he doesn’t even know that she’s married; and her younger daughter has started to have dark, obsessive thoughts—the girl’s teacher tells Jackie and Kevin that she circles her desk three times before she sits down, “so the planes don’t come out of the sky.” Jackie responds to people—her patients, her kids—with warmth and snap, but the closeup shots of her betray the vulnerability in her big eyes, and in her tired face, which, to Falco’s credit, she has allowed to be filmed in a way that does not mask how many years she’s been alive.
Falco’s winning performance is joined by two others: Deavere Smith’s, which comes as no surprise (watch her wave her finger at her employees as she warns them not to pharmaceutically help a former nurse die; it should win an Emmy for best supporting digit), and Merritt Wever’s. Zoey flaps around, trying to please, inserting herself where she’s not wanted, and is just touchingly, hilariously young. It’s inconceivable that this performance won’t send her career to the moon. Now, with apologies to Falco, a final bit of “Sopranos” housekeeping is in order. Paul Schulze—Eddie, the pharmacist—played Father Phil in “The Sopranos,” the smarmy priest with whom Carmela had a romantic dalliance early in the series. (They didn’t have sex; they just watched movies together.) Putting him in “Nurse Jackie” is a piece of truly whacked-out casting. Stupid and unfortunate: it’s now been proved, not once but twice, that he and Falco don’t have interesting chemistry onscreen; also, there are, oh, at least five or six other male actors in the United States, and surely one of them would have been happy to take the part.
Brixius said that she and her cocreators didn’t want to follow the usual medical-drama formula, with “a nurse who rides shotgun to a doctor.” The result, with its strong, complex, funny, flawed central character, feels truer to life than the zillions of one-dimensional (or no-dimensional) nurses on television. It’s not just corrective medicine, though—it actually tastes good. ♦
