Nurse Jackie: Season 1 (2009)

I stumbled across Nurse Jackie in the Radio Times, it's first 5 episodes were stripped across 5 nights one week in January, and after the first couple I was hooked. Edie Falco, from Oz and The Sopranos fame, is the titular Nurse Jackie, a woman with an apparent heart of gold, who also has a husband and 2 kids, and a lover at her hospital workplace, where no one knows she's even married. Except for her British best friend, Dr O'Hara, as wonderfully portrayed by Eve Best, who has an array of killer one-liners and a stunning wardrobe to match. 

The show is peopled with fantastic female characters - there's Nurse Jackie herself, who has a prescription drug habit and a love/home life that keeps getting more complicated, and she's also a realist who knows that faking donor cards is wrong, but it's the right thing to do; Dr O'Hara gets most of the show's best laughs, although she shares this honour with: Merritt Wever's frankly hilarious trainee nurse Zoey; and hospital administrator Gloria Akalitus, played by the formidable, and formidably funny, Anna Deavere Smith, in a much less serious role than that I'm most familiar with, when she was Dr Nancy McNally in The West Wing. 

In the very first episode a patient is brought in with his ear off - a prostitute bit it off when he beat her up - and Jackie winds up flushing the ear down the toilet... Only for it to bob back up an episode later to be discovered by Zoey! I love the black humour on show in Nurse Jackie, and the regular old (white?) humour too, usually involving Akalitus being trapped in a lift, electrocuted by a stun gun, or out of her mind on pain medication. Nurse Jackie's not just about laughs though, there are many poigniant moments, such as the euthanising of an old nurse workmate of Jackie's, and each episode ends on a bit of a low moment. I'm sad to see Nurse Jackie leave the airwaves, and I can't wait for the second season, which BBC2 promises later this year!

What's not to love about a show who's tag line is 'Life is full of little pricks'?