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?
And, having wasted one relationship, she takes advantage of the other, by using Eddie more for his position in the hospital, than anything else. Is she upset that he’s losing his job, or that she is losing her easy fix? The question was a gimme from the writers, but the fact that it could be a gimme says a ton of negative stuff about Jackie.
I really do wish that I could get on board with Nurse Jackie, or at the very least, have something positive to say about Falco, but it just isn’t going to happen. I actually never liked her on The Sopranos. And yet, having recently started re-watching that series again on DVD, I find myself detesting her even more! My fear that Carmela Soprano was coloring Jackie Peyton for me, was unfounded. Somehow, the opposite is true! Go figure.
I also find it harder and harder to get behind the idea that Jackie’s a good caregiver. How helpful can she be, if she’s constantly butting heads with the medical staff around the ER? While I fully see her as a comfort to patients and their families, isn’t that more the job of a candy-striper, or some hospital volunteer, than a nurse? And, what kind of doctors are we to imagine her hospital employs, if a nurse is constantly in the position of being medically correct?
That’s not to put nurses down, but I’d have to imagine that doctors are slightly more trained in their profession. There remains a disconnect between portraying nurses as skilled, and feeling the need to denigrate doctors in order to do so. Why can’t both be competent at the same time? What does that detract from Jackie and her team? It’d be great to see a little more respect paid to the doctors on the show, but, as far as I can tell, that’ll have to wait at least until the latter half of the first season.
Meanwhile, while I originally couldn’t stand Zoey’s ineptitude and self-consciousness, and was, and still am, instantly turned off by O’Hara’s cockiness and fakeness, the two together are sheer genius. The very characteristics that I dislike in the two play so perfectly together, that you have to wonder if the writers crafted them so black and white for the sole purpose of getting them together. They fit so well, that I wouldn’t discount the possibility too quickly.
Can two supporting actresses make up for an otherwise lacking show? Unlikely. But at least they give me a respite in an otherwise painful half-hour. I could hope for things to change, but, unfortunately, I dislike everything that is key to who Jackie is, and what the show intends to be.
But, hey, I can always hope that the drug addiction is an ace in the hole for the writers, a pre-existing means of knocking Jackie off. Here’s rooting for an overdose!
Clacked by Aryeh S.
on Jun 23, 2009 @ 13:00 EST5EDT
