Speaking of shows that work despite thin-sounding premises, how can you not love Nurse Jackie?

In this memorable scene, Jackie (Edie Falco) expresses her boundless admiration for the medical skills of Dr. "Call Me Coop" Cooper (Peter Facinelli).

by Ken

From the way Showtime sneaked Nurse Jackie into the schedule Monday nights at 10:30, you get the feeling the network doesn't think much of the comedy created by Liz Brixius, Evan Dunsky, and Linda Wallem, starring Edie Falco as a seen-it-all nurse surviving in an uneasy truce with the forces of chaos closing in on her both at work and at home.

It's a bad time for me, conflicting with TNT's Crossing the Bar (vastly improved over a first season so dreadful, I was startled to find that there is a second) and the Long Island PBS station's airing of reruns of MI-5 (aka Spooks in its native U.K.), only this time uncut, unlike the earlier A&E showings, which had to accommodate commercials. So the DVR has been even more indispensable than with HBO's Hung.

Jackie has what look like a standard array of sitcom accoutrements. At home she has her adorable and adoring if kind of dim husband, Kevin (Dominic Fumusa), and her two young daughters. At the hospital, she has her friendly pharmacist-and-more, Eddie (Paul Schulze), who's indispensable for the relief he provides what appears to be near-crippling back pain, as well as for certain other physical needs; her snooty doctor friend Eleanor (Eve Best), who behaves quite monstrously toward everone in Jackie's circle except Jackie herself (I'm no authority, but the very idea of a friendship-of-equals between a doctor and a nurse seems to me decidedly unusual, and intriguing); her stodgy, hovering, and distinctly strange supervisor, Mrs. Akalitis (Anna Deavere Smith); the always supportive and dependable young nurse Mo-Mo (Haaz Sleiman); and an awkward and intimidated (by everyone and everything) young trainee, Zoey (Merritt Wever), who dropped into Jackie's life in the first episode and began disrupting her routines.

Those routines are important to Jackie. She takes all the confusions and complications of her life more or less in stride, through a combination of structures in her life, those established routines, and when necessary a veteran's improvisations. Like most of us, she has made her accommodations to Life as We Know It, and to most observers probably utterly imperturbable.

Of course she's not, and sometimes one of the other characters, having failed to grasp that in her carefully laid-out life she has invisible lines it's dangerous to cross, sets off an outburst like the one we see in the above clip, prompted by the unnecessary death of a patient for whom she was powerless to get proper care. (It's for scenes like this that it's really useful to have an actress of Edie Falco's caliber rather than a network-favored "comedienne.")

For all the frustrations, improbabilities, and downright impossibilities (after all, there's an awful lot in a hospital that you can't control), she really does care about her job. As Dr. O'Hara points out, caring about patients is for nurses; she herself has no interest, except in so far as they present interesting medical challenges. (In a hilarious plot line, she found herself helpless in the face of undying gratitude from the mother and twin brother of a child whose life she saves.)

And then there are the curves thrown by life itself. Jackie and Kevin are thrown by the realization, thrust on them by their older daughter's teachers, that the otherwise confident and self-possessed Grace (Ruby Jerins) -- who's what, about 10? -- has an unremittingly bleak and terrified view of the world. Jackie has so far resisted making the obvious connection, probably because it's so scary. What may be bearable for an adult who's made her adjustments to whatever life throws her way is literally a nightmare for a child.

So far the show has been both funny, sometimes wildly so, and serious, all in all looking an awful lot like that Life as We Know It I was mentioning earlier. With really outstanding writing and acting, the show has me well hooked.

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