Nurse Jackie Season 1 Premiere
By: Katie Ryan | Category: Show Review | 06/19/09 | 03:51 PM
 |  |  Grade: B+ | Genre: Drama
Summary: In the world of Nurse Jackie, there is no sign in sight that anyone is listening, not even her Percocet.
On a lunch time break from work in the emergency room at All Saints Hospital, an admiring doctor remarks to Nurse Jackie Peyton that she's the only sane one in there. Jackie flashes a smile back, blank as the surgical mask she dons in the emergency room, in a world that could spin off its orbit at any time. |
Nurse Jackie has a hard-bitten, stoic demeanor. She doesn't "do chatty," likes mean and quiet people, and has an obsessive need for balancing moral equations in a harsh and uncaring world. She steals money from a rapist and gives it to a young, pregnant widow, she forges a brain dead patient's organ card, and flushes the severed ear of a thug down the toilet so it can't be reattached.
Between Dirty Harriet antics, Jackie lives in a dream world backed up with her Percocet mixed with Sweet'n'Low, supplied to her by the hospital pharmacist whom she meets with at noon every day in a supply room. The affair can be seen to be fueled by seedy eroticism, addiction, and love all into a single equation. Jackie knows a good buzz when she sees one.
Nurse Jackie, grimly funny, with streaks of malice and sentimentality is the summer season's television medical miracle. A hospital show, blue-collar style, with no McDreamy anywhere in sight. Edie Falco, three time Emmy award winner who played Carmela, the mafia Faustian princess in the Sopranos, is amazing as the embattled, erratic, pill popping Nurse Jackie.
The story is filled with intriguing, dotty characters like Nurse Jackie's best friend Eleanor O'Hara, played by Eve Best, the British actress. O'Hara, a doctor, and independently wealthy, is openly disdainful of her patients. She throws her clothes away rather than drying cleaning them because it would be just too tedious. Then there is the unstable Dr. Fitch Cooper played by Peter Facinelli of Twilight, an Ivy Leaguer prone to giving drive by diagnoses.
At home, there is Jackie's somber, dysfunctional ten year old daughter who prefers grim documentaries like Viral Armageddon over the Cartoon Network. Jackie accepts this as just one more indication of teetering over the brink and sign of misfortune, much like she does when that ear bobs back to life, causing her to curse the plumbing for backing up the one time she flushes a body part.
In the world of Nurse Jackie, there is no sign in sight that anyone is listening, not even her Percocet.
Catch Nurse Jackie on Showtime Monday nights at 8:30pm
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