Hello, welcome to my new blog - where I write about music, culture, life, and...tonight's TV. Nurse Jackie is on BBC 2 tonight at 10pm. It's Series Two, and I've only just discovered it. I came across it by accident one night when I couldn't be bothered to change the channel, and was taken by Edie Falco (formerly in The Sopranos) as Jackie Peyton, the no-nonsense emergency room nurse in a frantically pressured NYC hospital. She's not perfect. She's not an angel. In fact she's had an affair, she has a 'complicated' home life and is addicted to painkillers. Yet somehow she is a breezy, brisk, humane survivor - played with a down-to-earth honesty by Falco.
Nurse Jackie reminds me of that great '80s cop show Cagney & Lacey, with those two ballsy female detectives running amok in New York. Actresses Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly weren't made pretty for the camera - they were playing strong woman leading demanding lives. Too often American TV gives us the Hollywood version of femininity - even if it's tough forensics on violent cases (CSI), or businesslike lawyers (The Good Wife), they look impossibly sleek, glamorous and groomed, and come out with banalities. But there is another strand to American culture and women's history. The USA was built on strong, independent pioneer women. Martha Graham represented that in her modern dance pieces like Appalachian Spring. It's there in Frances McDormand's performance in the Coen brothers film Fargo. Women who get by in difficult circumstances with strength, humour and all the best lines.
So I'm addicted to Nurse Jackie. It only lasts half an hour, but it brightens up my night. It doesn't get a lot of attention and hype, but it has quietly established itself as one of the best dark comedy dramas on TV. It also reminds me of that '90s series Northern Exposure, about the lives and eccentricities of a small town community in Alaska. Again, Northern Exposure was one of those series that crept up on you. I didn't 'get it' at first, but one night its slow pace and gentle, subversive humour insinuated itself into my brain. I still remember that hilarious episode when the hapless young city physician Joel Fleischman encounters the midnight sun and stays awake three nights on the trot, babbling furiously.
Nurse Jackie doesn't have great hair-dos, but it has a fast, funny script, some brilliantly quirky characters, and suppressed mania that bubbles under the surface. Last week Jackie's best friend, Dr Eleanor O'Hara (Eve Best) got bad news about her mother, went out clubbing and came to work still high on ecstasy. Jackie straps Dr Eleanor to a hospital bed, attaches a nutritional drip, draws the curtains, and every so often brings her files to sign. Now there's a good friend!
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