We seem to have a glut of nursing shows right now, and I’ve been wondering why. Nursing shows aren’t new, per se. If you look back through history, you’ve got Julia, the 1968 series in which Diahann Carroll played a young nurse and single mom. The show was groundbreaking for a variety of reasons, namely because it starred an African American woman, raising a son alone because her husband died in the Vietnam war. That’s a lot of drama right there, especially given the era in which this show aired.

There have been a lot of shows that included nurses — certainly every doctor show that’s ever aired, including M*A*S*H, ER, China Beach, and all the hundreds of other medical shows. There was even a 1991 show called Nurses, which, apparently, lasted three seasons, though I have no recollection of it.

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As with most of the series that I’ve chosen to flashback to, writing about The Sopranos frightens me. How in the world is it possible to reflect on the magnitude of this work in just a (relatively) short post?

There’s only one place to start: this 86-episode opus, which spanned eight and-a-half years, and six (or five, and one in two parts) seasons, was a giant. While we spend the rest of this reminiscence dissecting, never lose sight of that fact. A giant.

I wasn’t a fan from the beginning. In fact, I think I consciously kept my distance, because I found it insulting that television would try and trample on the sacred grounds of The Godfather and Goodfellas. But my father-in-law (back when he was just my very longtime girlfriend’s father) would always tell me how great a series The Sopranos was. His favorite parts were Tony’s (James Gandolfini) sessions with Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), as he, himself, is a Freudian psychoanalyst. I know, right?

Needless to say, I enjoyed that aspect of the show least, but it was one particular encounter that my father-in-law relayed to me that finally got me to check out the show: when Dr. Melfi is raped, and she determines, in the end, not to tell Tony about it. I so disagreed with my in-law’s position that she made the right decision that I needed to see it for myself, in order to properly articulate my argument. I disagree with him to this day, but he got me hooked. Thanks for that. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not a fan of the show (though I’ve hidden it well, right?), so clearly these things don’t sit particularly well with me, but what in the world is with this ridiculous storyline on Nurse Jackie? Grace (Ruby Jerins) may have some sort of emotional (or whatever) problems, so Jackie and Kevin are called in to discuss options for therapy and medication?

Sure, the show’s been “building” towards this, but are we meant to feel sympathy for a mother whose focus is so stretched? Or for a woman who deals with life and death at work, and must now worry for her daughter on top of that?

Or, should we just be disgusted with the whore who gets disgusting text messages (“me so horny”) from her lover while she’s with her husband? So much so that she gets a second “cheater” cell. Wow! What a symbol of the modern-day woman! So evolved. So much growth. Read the rest of this entry »

The good news on Nurse Jackie is that there are characters to root for: O’Hara (Eve Best) and Zoey (Merritt Wever) make for an excellent pairing. The bad news? Jackie’s (Edie Falco) still around. Pop goes the weasel!

Jackie is just so disagreeable as a person. More than that, she’s detestable, disgusting, and completely un-desirable. What are people seeing in her?

Anything and everything that she does and discusses with her husband, Kevin (Dominic Fumusa), rings hollow, since we know that she spends her days cheating on him with Eddie (Paul Schulze). Her bald two-faceness is so shockingly brazen that I can’t believe that she feels any real emotion for her partner in life. How could she? Read the rest of this entry »

That’s right … today’s lesson from Nurse Jackie? Crush the pills, put the powder in empty sugar packets, and simply add to your coffee all day long.

For those who thought the pill particles were bad enough, along comes the slow-mo pouring of the sugar packet, or whichever supplement it was. Great use of cinematography!

As bad as that was, the most disturbing part of the second episode for me was the deja vu I experienced during the opening scene, where Jackie (Edie Falco) is cutting Kevin’s (Dominic Fumusa) hair in the kitchen. Anyone else see the pilot of Malcolm in the Middle in there? No? Just me, I guess.

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I’ve been watching Mental since it premiered a couple of weeks ago, and caught the premiere episode of Nurse Jackie this week, too. It’s hard not to draw comparisons to House with both of these shows, although I don’t know that either show is truly like House, which is in a class by itself (even though I haven’t watched it much the past few seasons). But let’s delve a little deeper into this notion:

Is Nurse Jackie a female House? Right off the bat, I’d say no. Even though she pops pills like House (or in her case, snorts them — can you snort Vicodin?), she actually cares about the patients. House is just as rude to the patients as he is to everyone else, and looks upon them as a puzzle to be solved.

Sure, they’ll both do whatever it takes to solve the medical mysteries, but she’s doing it because of a larger philosophy that if she doesn’t look after them, no one else will — certainly not the doctors, especially Dr. Cooper, played by Peter Facinelli. The jackass didn’t follow her advice and the patient died, so she made something right out of it and forged his signature on a donor card. I’m trying to decide if Dr. House would do this. It’s certainly rule-breaking enough, but I don’t know that he cares that much about someone else getting a patient’s organs illegally. What’s your thought on that?

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As you may have guessed from my series preview, I’m not a huge fan of Nurse Jackie. However, due to numerous factors (one of which being my fear of Debbie), I feel an obligation to keep up appearances.

In reality, while a lot about Nurse Jackie bothered me, as I said before, something still kept me watching through six preview episodes. Re-watching the pilot brought some ideas to mind as to why. Here’s one: I want to understand why the show does the things it does.

So, no, I won’t spend the entirety of my posts complaining. Instead, I have questions to pose, and I’m hoping that someone out there has some answers. Because, not only do I don’t, but I don’t think the series is going to provide them for me any time soon. Here’s what I got. Read the rest of this entry »