Edie Falco is good for what ails Showtime’s ‘Nurse Jackie’
June 8, 2009 at 3:42 pm by Curt Holman in movies & tvShowtime’s “Nurse Jackie” is cable television’s latest program about the fraught relationship between a person and a drug. “Nurse Jackie” debuts at 10:30 p.m. tonight, after the season premiere of “Weeds,” which casts Mary Louise Parker as a suburban mom turned marijuana dealer. AMC’s “Breaking Bad” features a high school chemistry teacher and cancer patient turned cooker of crystal meth. On “Nurse Jackie,” Edie Falco plays a big-city nurse who doesn’t just dispense pain medication, but abuses it. The pilot episode (see below) features medicine capsules separating and the grains tumbling dreamily through the air, in slow motion and extreme close-up, like those old commericals. (Or those.) Then Jackie snorts them.
Drugs open all kinds of potential doors on episodic dramas and dramedies. They provide sensationalism, the potential for law enforcement subplots, social agendas and entries into extra-legal subculture. “Nurse Jackie” primarily turns to drugs to dramatize the fissures in Jackie Peyton’s character. We assume she first turned to Vicodin, “Oxy” and the like out of necessity when working 80-hour weeks at New York’s All Saints Hospital. “What do you call a nurse with a bad back? Unemployed!” she quips in one of her first lines. She alludes to having once been an alchoholic, hinting at an addictive personality, and she carries on an alternately raw and tender affair with the hospital pharmacist (Paul Schulze), her Dr. Feelgood in more ways than one.
“Nurse Jackie” offers a more complex diagnosis of the flaws in Falco’s role. In an early scene, Merritt Wever’s rookie nurse asks, “Do you think there’s a finite amount of pain in the world?” and Jackie says, “Yes. That’s why there’s drugs.” Jackie doesn’t just turn to pharmaceuticals to cope with her back pain (and the double life the pills inevitably lead to), but the life-or-death consequences of her job — and for, that matter, the show. The pilot opens with a quote from T.S. Eliot and closes by twice evoking Saint Augustine’s “Make me good, God, but not yet.” The show’s darkly comedic humor, rather than deflate the self-seriousness, instead seems to exacerbate it, as if “Nurse Jackie’s” creators want to prove how bold and transgressive they can be with, for instance, the shtick about a young dope-head firing bottle rockets from his rectum.
Many TV pilots have brazen, “in your face” attitude to engross viewers (and presumably network decision makers) as quickly as possible, and don’t always accurately indicate the show’s tone after it gets picked up. Even the premiere of Falco’s previous series, “The Sopranos,” emphasized broader humor than the series usually resorted to. (Remember Carmela pulling an assault rifle out of the closet?) Fortunately, Falco seems so well cast in “Nurse Jackie” that she can anchor its excesses, no matter which direction it chooses to emphasize.
One of the fascinating qualities of Falco’s work as Carmela was that she never fit the stereotypical image of a mob wife, coming across as too decent to be complicit in an evil lifestyle, and too tough to put up with a bullying marriage. Such qualities shine in her performance as a seen-in-all nurse, and she alternates from cynicism to irony to compassion without ever missing a step. Falco adds spark to even the familiar situations, such as Jackie chewing out douchey young Dr. Cooper (Peter Falcinelli).
Occasionally the show finds an intriguingly dreamy, off-kilter tone that may emulate Jackie’s medicated headspace and differs sharply from the caffeinated pace of medical shows like “E.R.” If “Nurse Jackie’s” first episode seems to waver between too extreme and too serious, it’s probably because the writers want to provide Falco with a rich, knotty character with plenty of potential for further development and complication. Some side effects may occur.
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