Make an Argument
Why Nurse Jackie Stumbled in Season Two
By Eric Hughes
June 9, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Though its debut season goes more or less the way you’d expect it to, Nurse Jackie displayed a heck of a lot of promise for a series relying on a regrettably tired show format.
I mean, come on, how many more hospital dramas does cable, let alone all of television, really need? NBC alone promoted two new ones in fall 2009. Both, of course, failed pretty miserably.
Nurse Jackie, however, was different. Instead of an hour-long drama, Showtime presented it in cute, 30-minute-or-less installments. And unlike the ERs of yesteryear or the sudsy Grey’s Anatomys of today, Nurse Jackie was funny. So much so that it made more sense to label the thing a dark comedy than anything else.
As the season progressed, viewers quickly realized that the fantastic Edie Falco didn’t have to carry the show on her shoulders either. Instead, producers surrounded her with one of the most colorful casts of secondary characters on television: Anna Deavere Smith (Akalitus) played one hell of a frenemy, Peter Facinelli (Coop) knew the recipe for friendly egomaniac and Merritt Wever (Zoey) stole scenes like it was her job.
Even the season finale left committed viewers, much like myself, in a twist. Jackie’s side project, Eddie, told her he knew she was married. (Gasp!).Worse yet, Jackie, fraught with shame, stole three morphine vials from the hospital’s automatic pill dispenser and swallowed them together, rendering her useless on the floor of the hospital ladies room.
Not only was she staring probable overdose in the face, but it’d potentially expose her as a drug addict to her compadres as well since she used her PIN to score the vials.
Well.
Season two has already come and gone – the finale aired Monday night – and I strongly feel like it was little more than 12 episodes of misfire. Even worse, the show really hasn’t an idea of what it wants to be. Here why:
Like an average episode of Glee, Nurse Jackie 2.0 hit the reset button… big time
Really, anything that happened last year was erased in the season two premiere. Eddie’s disgruntled attitude toward his fuck buddy? He coped (and, well, mentally jumped the shark). Jackie’s overdose? She pulled through. Those stolen vials of morphine? Faulty machine, demonstrated by Jackie minutes into the premiere. It’s like the writers room gave up on their one-year-old baby and started anew.
In some instances, of course, it makes sense – or simply works – to reinvent the universe. Come July on Mad Men, Don Draper et al. will be viewing the world with new eyes. The same can be said of Showtime’s Dexter, which begins its fifth season in a couple of months after ending things in 2009 on a shocking note.
But Nurse Jackie? Nurse Jackie?! Pressing the reset button after a mere 12 episodes is pitiful. That, my friends, is the definition of writing into a hole and not working a way out. Or, it’s a lack of faith in the direction of the series. Or, it’s a disregard
for Nurse Jackie devotees. Or, it’s a combination of the three.
I guess I leave little room for rebuttal here because the notion that all should be forgotten feels cheap. Other than to introduce and then flesh out a cast of generally likeable characters, I don’t see the point of Nurse Jackie 1.0. It’s like a prologue on serious [insert baseball player’s name here] steroids.
Jackie’s immediate family will make anyone proud of where they came from
Where Nurse Jackie could have benefited from a reset, however, is in Jackie Peyton’s family makeup. I mean really, her husband is a robot and her kids clearly need something to do.
Attentive viewers would have noticed that Jackie’s youngest, Fiona, was replaced by a different actress in season two. I wish the same could be said of Jackie’s hubby, Kevin, who very may be the least compelling major character in all of television.
In the first season, it made sense for him to be a bore. Kevin’s dullness made Eddie look like a catch. Kevin’s dullness made the quickies between Jackie and Eddie believable. Eddie offered something – a personality! – that Kevin couldn’t provide.
Jackie’s infidelity – I can’t believe I’m saying this – felt right. Eddie challenged Jackie, whereas Kevin was, well, Kevin.
With Eddie as a non-factor in season two – or, at least, as he quickly morphed into a different being entirely from the Eddie of Nurse Jackie 1.0 – we were left with a husband and wife team that no reputable network would ever approve of.
Yet Showtime merely did because Nurse Jackie isn’t a first-year show anymore.
On a related note, Jackie’s daughters still do nothing in the context of the show, and it irks me. Gracie is moody and suffers from OCD like whoa while Fiona snaps photos of dead animals and has evil heathen friends who Jackie screams at from time to time.
As far as I’m concerned, they’ve experienced little to no growth in their 24 episodes of screen time. What’s their arc supposed to be? Coupled with Kevin, Jackie’s home life just drags.
Coop
Cooper is, simply, an intriguing piece of character who, like Jackie’s daughters, hardly did anything new in season two. He’s still an egomaniac, he’s still grabbing boobs (Tourette’s) and he’s still kidding himself if he thinks that Jackie would ever want to go see Hair with him.
What did it for me last season was Coop’s reveal that he had two moms. Coop’s birth mother (Blythe Danner) was christened “vagina mom.” All in all, a good time.
I hoped for further insight into his character this season, but regrettably came back empty handed. Other than break his nose – twice – Coop did little to build on what we already discovered a season ago.
My friends, all isn’t lost. (Though my write-up will probably have you believing otherwise).
So long as Nurse Jackie’s writers focus on two very important things in 2011, we very well could have something that resembles a second season that we arguably didn’t get this spring.
For one, ushering Eddie back into his old job at All Saints was a godsend. As creepily disturbing as he was for a majority of the season, he strangely righted his wrongs with me once he started adorning his white lab coat again.
Look, I’ll merrily expunge from memory Eddie’s tendency to stalk the ones he loves – really – so long as he’s carefully reestablished as the stable and friendly bloke I remember from season one.
And two, more Zoey and Thor stories please.
Zoey got herself a boyfriend, underwent a pregnancy scare and somehow was more comical than the Zoey from Nurse Jackie 1.0. Meanwhile, Thor came out of nowhere this season and quietly became the series’ unofficial dark horse. He’s quirky, and he’s snippy, but he deserves a meaty storyline in season three.