Get Me a Nurse – Hey, Make That a Double: TV By Dave Shiflett (Bloomberg) – There’s a nurse shortage in the real world but in TV land two are hanging their shingles in June. The prognosis for both shows enjoying healthy life-spans is excellent. “Nurse Jackie,” which debuts June 8 on Showtime at 10:30 p.m. New York time, stars Edie Falco, formerly Mrs. Tony Soprano, as Jackie Peyton. She works in the emergency room at All Saints Hospital in Manhattan and is as edgy as a box of razor blades. She’s also an addict, a wife and the mother of two kids. “Hawthorne,” which airs June 16 on TNT at 9 p.m. New York time, stars Jada Pinkett Smith, currently Mrs. Will Smith, as Christina Hawthorne, a much straighter arrow who oversees the nursing staff at Richmond Trinity Hospital in Virginia. Her husband resides in an urn, courtesy of cancer, though she talks to him on a regular basis. Both women are strong, passionate and have limitless dedication to their patients, unlike some of the doctors they have to contend with. Both are saintly, in their own ways, though Jackie’s more my type of saint. Falco definitely moves out of Tony Soprano’s large shadow in this “dark comedy,” which starts out with the Jackie lying flat on her back while reciting the opening lines to T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” She’s in a deep funk because she’s just about out of pain pills. She has a bad back and needs additional drugs to help her through 80-hour workweeks. Many viewers are likely to fall hard for her when she tells a young associate, “I don’t do chatty. I like quiet. Quiet and mean – those are my people.” Doctors, on the other hand, can be definite health hazards. A bike messenger comes in with a broken leg. Jackie suspects a deeper injury as well but the arrogant young buck on call, Dr. Fitch Cooper (Peter Facinelli) is sure he knows better. “Knock! Knock!” he chirps to the patient. “Who’s there?” the injured man responds, which convinces the doc that all’s well. In the next scene, the messenger is Nirvana-bound, inspiring Jackie to observe, loudly: “I have seen hundreds of you jerk offs blow through these doors.” The scene that may capture her spirit best of all features an employee of the Libyan ambassador, who has had his ear sliced off in a dispute with a hooker, whom he has grievously assaulted. Yet he won’t be prosecuted because of his status. Jackie knows just what the doctor should order. She clasps the excised ear in a pair of hemostats, hisses “F--- you!” into it, then flushes it down the toilet. That’s the way the world is supposed to work. Doc-botch is also a theme in “Hawthorne,” which is billed as a dramatic series. In the opener a bitchy doctor has ordered an injection for a patient. Nurse Ray Stein (David Julian Hirsh), phones her to warn that the dosage is wrong, for which he receives a tongue lashing. The patient, a twice-deployed veteran, barely survives, though the doctor is unrepentant. One hopes someone drops a house, or perhaps ambulance, on her in a future episode. While Jackie’s salty and weary Christina is deeply earnest and a knockout. Her staff includes several other babes, including a buxom brunette with a prosthetic leg and a blonde who, in one scene, conducts a strategic laying on of hands that could raise many corpses from the dead. Both shows feature plenty of the sorts of crazies who visit hospitals, including a 16-year-old stoner who launches roman candles from his buttocks and a psycho who chases his wife into the emergency room with a butcher knife. Viewers looking for a role model will prefer Christina while the jaded will prefer Jackie, who nonetheless takes time from her hellish schedule to contemplate the virtues of sainthood. She’s clearly not ready to don the hair shirt. Her credo, repeated a couple of times, comes from Saint Augustine: “Make me good God, but not yet.” Both shows are good from the get-go, unless you happen to be a doctor.
