Nurse Jackie Finale and Dangerous Bubbles

I caught the Nurse Jackie season 1 finale on Showtime On Demand a few days ahead of time. Here's a mostly spoiler-free review...

First, given that Nurse Jackie has been renewed for a second season, you know she's going to live. But will the bubbles of delusion she has carefully constructed around her intersecting personal and professional lives?

The whole season has been an incredible, sometimes unbelievable, but entertaining even riveting dance on the edges of these bubbles. How can Jackie be happily married to a great husband, with two children, and happily carrying on an affair with the pharmacist in the hospital? It's not just because she needs the drugs - she's clearly enjoying the affair. And now she's playing with additional fire with the pretty boy young doctor.

And how can she keep feeding her ferocious drug addiction under everyone's noses in the hospital?

And while she's doing all of this, she manages - usually - to come through for her friends.

Rather than resolving these impossible matters - rather than bursting any of the bubbles - the finale keeps them afloat, and indeed casts Jackie into a bigger, more dangerous bubble ....

And I'll be back with my musings on that when the next season debuts.



5-min podcast review of Nurse Jackie

See also Sneak Preview of Nurse Jackie ... Nurse Jackie at 6 ... Nurse Jackie at 8

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

Nurse Jackie at 8

Nurse Jackie - the Showtime series about the tough-as-nails nurse with a raging pill addiction and a heart of golden compassion - is eight episodes in, and still getting better with every episode, which is pretty good indeed.

Edie Falco in the lead now seems much more like Jackie than Carmela, which is a testament to Falco's considerable talent. And the supporting characters, ranging from a doctor who repeatedly grabs Jackie (he has some kind of sexual tic - handy indeed) to an administrator (a former nurse) who makes your public school principal seem like the nicest person in the world, keep the series engagingly off-balance and fun.

My favorite character in the past two episodes is the baby who shows up in the hospital, without parents or caretakers. Administrator Gloria Akalitus unhappily takes charge.

Meanwhile, Jackie's problems with her own older daughter Grace are getting no easier. To makes things worse, the grabby Dr. Cooper overhears Jackie talking to Grace, leaving Jackie no choice but to tell Cooper she was talking to her daughter. Cooper is not only tic-ridden but talkative, and he tells Eddie about Jackie's daughter.

It's still not clear to me how Jackie has been able to disguise her family ties to apparently most of the doctors and nurses and medical personnel in the hospital this long. But, then again, she's also been able to disguise her addiction from just about everyone except Eddie.

The peril of disguise is in fact the transcending theme of Nurse Jackie, and it's making for quietly addictive viewing...

See also Sneak Preview of Nurse Jackie ... Nurse Jackie at 6



5-min podcast review of Nurse Jackie

---

The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

Nurse Jackie at 6

Hey, I've seen the first six episodes of Nurse Jackie on Showtime, so I figured I'd pop back in here with a little review....

First, I'm glad to see that Paul Schultze's Eddie is finding getting some good sex with Edie Falco's Jackie. Back on The Sopranos, Schultze's Father Phil never quite got to first base with Falco's Carmela, but it's more than possible that he didn't really want to, and preferred the food dance instead.

Though, it's intriguingly not at all clear on Nurse Jackie exactly how she feels about the relationship, and what she wants from it. She certainly values Eddie as a source of her pills - which she clearly can't live without - and she seems to enjoy the sex. But it may well be that she'll drop him like a hot potato if the drug pipeline is closed. And it's not easy to maintain an affair with Eddie with her husband Kevin - with whom she also enjoys a good relationship - often on the verge of dropping by the hospital.

Jackie's relationship with her two daughters - especially her older daughter, Grace - also bears watching. Grace's drawing without sun or color catches the concerned attention of her teacher, and Jackie is slowly beginning to see that Grace may need some help. If you ask me, the drawing is no big deal - I agree with Jackie on that - but there may be other symptoms.

The series is slowly percolating, with a suitably slightly zany cast of characters and stories, and I'm looking forward to it coming to a boil....


See also Sneak Preview of Nurse Jackie ... Nurse Jackie at Eight




5-min podcast review of Nurse Jackie

Sneak Preview Review of Nurse Jackie!

I caught the first episode of Nurse Jackie a few months ago. It's to debut on Showtime on June 8 at 10:30 PM (ET/PT) - right after the season premier of Weeds - and I've been dying to tell you about it, but had to respect the "embargo" (I do enjoy tossing around terms like that - makes me feel like a real inside reviewer), but I can tell you about it, at last, right now, so here goes -

First, the half-hour episodes star Edie Falco, just great of late as Carmela on The Sopranos, and in fact in every TV show or movie in which she appears, and she's feisty, sharp, tough, vulnerable as Nurse Jackie.

There haven't been too many nurse shows on television - the last ones were The Nurses, The Doctors and The Nurses, and The Nurses, three versions of the same show, the first two prime time, the last a daytime soap, back in the 1960s. There have been plenty of excellent, provocative, even powerful nurses on doctor shows ranging from St. Elsewhere to Chicago Hope and ER, but they have usually been in supporting roles - Nurses Hathaway (Julianna Margulies) and Lockhart (Maura Tierney) on ER were exceptions. So, with that as backdrop, it's especially refreshing to see a show that centers completely around a nurse.

The elements of the story are mostly familiar. Jackie stands up to arrogant doctors, is smarter than some of them, and is willing to break the rules to save a life. She's on pain killers (ala House), and of course is sleeping with at least one doctor. She likes sex.

There's a jolting surprise at the end of the first episode - along the lines of our finding Furillo in bed with Joyce at the end of the pilot of Hill Street Blues - but I'm not going to tell you what it is, and it's not specifically like that Hill Street Blues scene, it's reminiscent of the shock value....

You'll have to see the premier of Nurse Jackie to see what I mean - you won't be disappointed.

See also Nurse Jackie at 6