Five Observations About Nurse Jackie

Earlier this month, just as I was about to cancel my cable television package, I searched for and found Nurse Jackie. After watching the freebie teaser offered by Showtime, I found it irritating that despite my paying $109.19 per month, I would be denied the opportunity to watch future episodes of a series featuring Edie Falco, one of my favorite actors. I liked her when she played Carmela Soprano, and I like her even more in this new role casting her as a skilled professional.

On first impression, it seemed that Comcast would provide me with HBO or Showtime, but not both. Though I haven’t bought into Hung, HBO’s new series about a high school athletic coach moonlighting as a male prostitute, I was hesitant about relinquishing the ability to watch old episodes of a much better HBO series, The Wire, on demand.

Comcast sales people are good, and the woman listened carefully to the fact that I kept coming back to wanting to watch Nurse Jackie. By the end of our conversation, the woman in sales sold me on signing a two year contract for a new cable package offering two things: $25.90 off my monthly bill, and the ability to add Showtime.

Having seen just the first four episodes of Nurse Jackie – I recorded the fifth one on Tivo for viewing this evening – I’d like to share just five observations about both the series and the character of Nurse Jackie, a/k/a Jackie Peyton:

1) I can’t get the music from the first episode of Nurse Jackie out of my head, and knew it sounded familiar. A visit to YouTube confirmed it’s actually the theme song Dory and Andre Previn wrote for the 1967 movie, Valley of the Dolls, to be sung by Dionne Warwick. The lyrics, “Gotta get off, gonna get/Off of this merry-go-round” refer to a woman trying to recapture her pride and self-confidence.

2) Like the starlets and showgirls depicted in Valley of the Dolls -- based on Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 novel, Nurse Jackie has a serious substance abuse problem. She’s addicted to prescription painkillers, including Vicodin and Oxycontin. Knowing that in real life substance abuse can result in flawed judgment and loss of one’s professional license, I fear for her well-being.

3) Nurse Jackie cheats on her husband with Eddie, the hospital pharmacist who plies her with pills. I find this troubling -- her back pain notwithstanding -- but cut her some slack because she seems to love her husband. Since I don’t want to think of her as someone who uses other people, I want to believe that she cares about the pharmacist, but more as friend/supplier than lover. At the same time, I wonder whether an upcoming episode will contain a visit by federal regulators checking to see how well the hospital is doing in tracking controlled substances.

4) Nurse Jackie’s most likeable quality is that she’s committed to providing competent, compassionate care for her patients, and treats them with respect. Not afraid to stand up to a mean-spirited hospital administrator, she ensures that an elderly cardiac patient who wants no further care is able to live his last few hours in dignity, as his wife feeds him chicken soup.

5) Nurse Jackie, the loving mother of two little girls, also has a feisty side. When she learns the “john” leaving a prostitute with enough slash wounds to require 287 stitches and 10 pints of blood has been admitted to the emergency room too, she makes a quick decision about his missing ear. Realizing it’s the same ear handed to when the prostitute was admitted, she flushes it down the toilet. But Nurse Jackie takes this action only after learning that he will escape prosecution because he’s got diplomatic immunity.

What are your observations about Nurse Jackie – the television series, the characters, or Edie Falco?