Edie Falco had her pick of projects after winning television’s highest honor for her rich portrayal of a suburban mob wife.
The role she picked is a far cry from the entitled, well-manicured, SUV-driving dilettante Carmela Soprano.
In “Nurse Jackie,” coming June 8 on Showtime, she plays Jackie Peyton, a hard-working, hard-bitten New York City emergency room nurse with her own somewhat arbitrary moral code — and a teensy pill problem.
Jackie has seen it all: smug young doctors; variously obnoxious, pathetic and hopeless patients. She has a bureaucratic boss (Anna Deavere Smith) and a British best- friend doctor (Eve Best) and a gay male nurse buddy. She suffers back pains but has easy access to meds, since her boyfriend is the hospital pharmacist. She aims to put things right, taking advantage of her position to even the score — taking the money clip from the man who stabbed a prostitute and giving it to a pregnant widow, for instance.
Not just a nurse, she’s Robin Hood with a good bedside manner, taking it upon herself to make crucial end-of-life decisions for patients who are no longer able.
She doesn’t do chatty.
“Quiet and mean, those are my people,” she tells an overly enthusiastic first-year nurse.
She tidies up after life where she sees the need, blasts the self-important jerks (she’s seen their type a hundred times) and does her part to make sense of the chaos.
Jackie is aware of her own frailties and compromises. She speaks the words of an addict: “Make me good, God . . . but not yet.”
Her foul-mouthed bluntness with young paramedics is part of her charm: “So help me God, do not call me ma’am!”
Inspired by the journal of an actual Manhattan ER nurse, “Nurse Jackie” is executive produced by Caryn Mandabach (“Roseanne”). The pilot is pitch-perfect. Subsequent episodes dazzlingly straddle the line between comedy and drama, with Falco hitting all the right notes.
Chalk up a win for Showtime. At least the current crisis in medical care is good for generating compelling tales for television entertainment.
“Royal Pains”
In a more superficial vein, USA unveils a slight medical drama, “Royal Pains,” that dances around some of the same moral questions. The focus here is Mark Feuerstein (“What Women Want”), a dedicated physician who, due to bad luck and officious hospital administrators, loses his job at a New York institution. Through happenstance, he becomes a “concierge doctor” to the super-rich in the Hamptons. He’s the reluctant hero who would rather do good than do well.
The pilot, Thursday at 8 p.m. on USA, is too cute by half, offering a titillating glimpse of super wealth while setting up romantic possibilities.
The medical themes with swimming-pool backdrops of “Royal Pains” are innocuous. For a thoughtful character study delivered by a top- notch actress, with a bias toward nurses rather than doctors, stick with “Nurse Jackie.”
Pregnant teens
This isn’t how she expected her senior year to go. Marci broke the news to her mom via text message: She’s knocked up. Now she’s sharing her story with the world. Premiering June 11, the MTV docu-series “16 and Pregnant” sucks any glamour out of the idea of teen pregnancy as it follows teen girls for five to seven months of their pregnancies. Cameras were present for some of the births — and for much of the bickering with boyfriends.
The hope, heartbreak, pragmatic questions and daily grind of an extremely difficult passage are on display in six teen-friendly hours.
It could have been a voyeuristic mess of “reality” programming. Instead, it’s an eye-opener at a time when the teen birth rate is on the rise for the first time in a generation.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
