Edie Falco's 'Nurse Jackie' Kicks Off A Prime-Time Nurseapalooza

Nurse Jackie: Showtime's new offering brings Edie Falco back to pay cable and is only the tip of a much larger nursing iceberg coming to series television. Showtime

 

by Mark Blankenship

You may have noticed that for the next few months, scripted television will be a nurse-a-palooza. On June 8, Edie Falco dons white rubber shoes for Showtime's dark sitcom Nurse Jackie (you can see an edited version of the pilot here), and eight days later, Jada Pinkett Smith debuts on TNT's HawthoRNe, the press materials for which really do capitalize the "RN" in the title.

And you're probably thinking, "That's great, but I need more Trachtenberg." Fortunately for you, the fall will bring NBC's Mercy, starring Michelle Trachtenberg as part of a trio of hardworking nurses.

But what's causing this sudden influx of nursing series?

Cynical media hounds will tell you they aren't surprised. They'll say the country's inexhaustible appetite for medical dramas was bound to produce a nursing spike, because TV execs would rather convince us an old formula is new than try something that hasn't been tested.

You can imagine the pitch meeting, right? "Yes, Jackie Hawthorne's Mercy will be America's 450th hospital show, but this time, the doctors are supporting characters and the nurses are the leads! It's totally original!"

Meanwhile, sensitive social analysts will declare that these nursing shows demonstrate television's ever-growing stature as a great place for female narratives. Hawthorne joins Saving Grace and The Closer in TNT's slate of femme-friendly dramas, while Nurse Jackie shares a network with Weeds and The United States of Tara.

Throw in shows like True Blood, Damages, and Big Love, and you can see that for every movie with a poorly developed girlfriend character, there are three series with complex female leads. Television honors a woman's worth.

And yeah ... maybe. But I think we know the real reason these shows are springing up.

The sins of the TV-nursing past, after the jump...

After almost two decades of denial, the television industry has finally admitted that it must atone for the nursing shows it created in the late '80s and early '90s. I mean, Nurse Jackie looks really good, and even if Hawthorne is busted, it's putting Michael Vartan's delicious hotness on display. Those are clear acts of repentance.

In case you've forgotten, let me remind you of television's previous nursing crimes. Here are two of the greatest blights on the profession:

(1) Nurses

Probably because it was a spin-off of The Golden Girls, which also produced Empty Nest and eventually The Golden Palace, this "comedy" survived for three seasons from 1991-1993. I totally watched it, but even as a twelve-year-old with lax cultural judgment, I thought it stunk. (But what was I going to do? Not watch TV?)

The show's Wikipedia page references a character whose thick Hispanic accent was played for laughs. That sounds about right, because based on the above clip, which features Rue McClanahan visiting as Blanche, Nurses is clearly a show that trades in cheap laughs. This shoddy scene just proves how great the writing on The Golden Girls really was, because on her own show, Blanche was never reduced to a cheap vaudevillian set-up for a joke about astronauts.

(2) Nightingales

I have no memory of this short-lived 1989 drama about nursing school students, but based on its opening credits, I'm dying to see it. Doesn't it seem like a camp classic? I mean, why are there so many shots of aerobics classes? What kind of hell did that child actress wreak? And why does the montage of close-ups at 1:16 look like a series of outtakes from a Diet Coke commercial, where businesswomen try to guess how many calories were in the delicious cola they just tried? I want answers!

Bonus points go to any series starring both Suzanne Pleshette and a pre-Buffy Kristy Swanson, but still... Nightingales clearly merits an apology — in the form of Edie Falco as a tragicomic nurse with sexy, sexy secrets.

For more from Mark Blankenship, visit The Critical Condition.