Loaded Couch Potatoes

This will be a short review of the pilot episode of Nurse Jackie, but it won’t be spoiler-free.  Oh, no; definitely not spoiler-free.  Not that this is The Sixth fucking Sense or anything, but still … you’ve been warned.

You can probably tell from the poster that Nurse Jackie is putting off a small bit of Californication vibe, showing us a character who just doesn’t give much of a fuck.  Of course, that’s not really true about ole Hank Moody, who actually cares quite a lot, and you can say much the same of Jackie Peyton.  She cares; she cares so much that she has a pill problem and an adultery problem and a flushing ears down toilets problem and a forging signatures on organ donor cards problem and who knows what other kinds of problems too.

If some of this sounds maybe a tad familiar, there’s good reason for it.  In some ways, Nurse Jackie feels a bit like Californication by way of House with a dash of … ah, who knows what all is in this stew.  It’s derivative, let’s just say it and be done with it.

I’ve got to admit, though, that I don’t mind a show being derivative.  Hell, if it entertains me, I won’t get too upset if it resorts to outright theft.  Except for one moment toward the end of the pilot, more on which later, I don’t think there’s much outright theft going on in this episode.

Except, of course, for the outright theft of nearly every scene by one Edie Falco, who might also find herself stealing an Emmy or two for her work on this show.  You never know where a show will go or what will happen to it along the way, but it’s just as plain as day that Falco is doing great work on this series.  It seems to be utterly effortless, too; you buy Falco in the role immediately, and I never one time found myself thinking of Carmela Soprano.  Not even when Jackie has sex with a doctor played by Paul Schulze; Nurse Jackie getting banged by Father Phil from The Sopranos, now there’s fun.

Other cast members include: Eve Best as a doctor friend of Jackie’s; Twilight‘s Peter Facinelli (hilariously douchebaggy as another doctor) in what might prove to be a real breakout role; another Sopranos vet, Dominic Fumusa (he played a relative of Chris’s in one episode, and here plays Jackie’s husband); Haaz Sleiman as a male nurse who is a friend of Jackie’s; Anna Deavere Smith (you might recognize her as the NSA advisor on The West Wing), playing the hospital administrator, I think; and Merritt Wever (she was on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip), who plays a bubbly nursing student Jackie takes under her wing.

The cast is pretty good, but other than Schulze, Wever, and Facinaelli, I didn’t get much out of any of their characters.  Perhaps future episodes will improve this.

Jackie spends a decent amount of the episode rationing her one remaining pain pill, and spends much of the rest of it either helping people more than she’s obligated or screwing people over when they deserve screwing over and there’s nobody else there to do the deed.  Facinelli’s character ignores her advice, which leads to a dead patient.  The dead man’s pregnant girlfriend shows up, broke and despondent, and Jackie helps her out by stealing a pair of her doctor friend’s boots, stealing the money clip of a patient who has sliced up a woman but is immune from prosecution due to his diplomatic status (!) (so implausible, so hilarious), and giving the loot to her while she’s sleeping on a couch.  Of course, she also forged her boyfriend’s signature so that his organs could be harvested and donated, but that’s a good deed of a different color, so who cares, really?

Presumably, the series will follow some sort of pattern similar to this, and that’s fine by me.  I can see it becoming formulaic, but Falco is good enough that I’ll give it quite a lot of leeway to get goofy and implausible and formulaic.

My one real complaint with this episode is that the ending is liften almost entirely from the ending of the pilot to Mad Men: the main character, whom we’ve been following the whole episode and whom we’ve seen screwing somebody so that the idea of her/him being married is the furthest thing from our minds, goes home to … a spouse and two kids.  Sure, in this one Jackie is carrying an adulterer’s Moon Pie (!) to give to her daughter; I don’t recall that Don Draper ever brought home any Moon Pies to anybody (although I’m betting that young Dick Whitman et more than a few of ‘em down on the farm).  Maybe Sterling-Cooper will take on the Moon Pie folk as clients during season three; wouldn’t that be a hoot?

Seriously, though, did the people who made Nurse Jackie not watch the pilot to Mad Men?  If not, good on them for coming up with the idea independently; but also, shame on them for not watching one of the best shows of the last decade.  And if they did watch it, well, at least they stole from the best.

I enjoyed this pilot, and will definitely be watching more episodes.  The premiere got good ratings, and Showtime has already renewed the series for a second season, so it looks like Edie Falco is back on our screens for a while longer.  I can’t imagine why anyone would complain about that.