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Why Nurse Jackie, poised to have an excellent season 2, stumbled. (And, what it can do to get back on track)

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.

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