Nick Nolte is like Clark Gable with an anguished soul. Writing about him in 1982, when he’d been playing movie leads for about half a decade, the critic Pauline Kael called him “an ideal screen actor — believable, and with a much larger range than McQueen or Wayne.” Like Steve McQueen and John Wayne in their best roles, it’s his physical actions that often articulate what’s going on under the surface; like Gable and Mitchum, he’s magically relaxed on screen and projects an outsize, sprawling likability. But his real lineage is agonized men’s men like William Holden and Dana Andrews and Robert Ryan, and later Paul Newman — actors whose sensitivity complicates their macho credentials.
“I work from emotion,” he reminds his acting coach, Mel Weiser, who wrote about the process of working with him in “Nick Nolte: Caught in the Act.” “I have to know why I’m feeling what I’m feeling. What’s behind it? How is it expressed? What’s its source?” And when you think back on great moments in Nolte performances, generally what come to mind are the ones where the tough-guy hero is strung up by the depth of his own feelings. You may recall the scene in the Nicaragua-set “Under Fire,” when his character, the prize-winning photojournalist Russel Price, recognizes that the photos he snapped of the Sandinistas, whose revolution he’s fallen in love with, have been used to hunt them down and kill them. Or the moment in “Who’ll Stop the Rain” when he realizes he’s going to sacrifice himself for his best friend, a hapless drug runner, and for the woman he loves.
Or perhaps the image in “Life Lessons” (the Martin Scorsese segment of “New York Stories”) of Lionel Dobie, his face and bare chest smeared with the paint from his latest canvas, sunk in a chair like a Francis Bacon figure, looking up with absurdly grandiose romantic longing at the room where his much younger assistant (Rosanna Arquette), who has rejected him sexually, is making love to someone her own age. And most certainly the climactic scene in “The Prince of Tides” where Tom Wingo’s confession that he was raped at 13 seems to burn out of his eyes — those eyes that have, throughout the movie, been like tunnels sucking down the painful memories the psychiatrist (Barbra Streisand) who’s treating his damaged sister keeps prodding.
Nolte was born in Omaha, Neb., in 1941 and spent 14 years acting in regional theaters, including the Actors Inner Circle in Phoenix, where he got to sink his teeth into Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, as well as try his hand at Anouilh, Durrenmatt, Frisch. That’s where he met both Weiser, the company’s co-founder, and Nolte’s first wife, Sheila Page, who co-starred with him in a production of “The Rainmaker.” He’s been married three times in all; his third wife, Rebecca Linger, is the mother of his only son, Brawley, who displayed his legacy in his only movie role — he was terrific as Mel Gibson’s kidnapped boy in “Ransom.” Nolte currently lives with the actress Vicki Lewis, whom he met on the set of “I’ll Do Anything.”
Nolte appeared in a handful of movies and TV shows in the early ’70s, but his breakthrough came in 1976, when he played Tom Jordache in the miniseries “Rich Man, Poor Man.” Nolte was already 35, but he carried off Jordache’s 17 — deftly enough to earn an Emmy nomination and the romantic lead in a moronic Peter Yates adventure called “The Deep,” which came out the following year and initiated a remarkably prolific Hollywood career. (“Simpatico,” due out this Christmas, marks his 35th movie role since “Rich Man, Poor Man” made him a hot property.)
It’s clear he was cast in “The Deep,” opposite Jacqueline Bisset, for his sexy-hip ’70s look: He sports a thick ginger moustache and a mop of gold-dusted hair, and when he’s not diving (the film is set in Bermuda) he wears the neo-Renaissance outfits that were just coming out of fashion — ruffled shirt, white bells. He doesn’t look 17 but he could pass for, say, 25, and he’s certainly handsome enough in this pin-up role to be the hero of a Hollywood action picture. Yates probably cast him without caring whether he could act, and the only thing he’s got going for him is a kind of renegade energy — though at this juncture, for all we know it could be beach-bum vibes we’re picking up, not talent.
But in “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” his next picture, you know you’re watching an actor. I hadn’t seen Nolte on TV and he had barely registered with me in “The Deep,” so I recall being startled when “Who’ll Stop the Rain” came out: Here was this imaginative, fully formed movie actor giving a highly complex performance in a major role, and where the hell had he come from? As Ray Hicks, whose Marine buddy (Michael Moriarty) gives him a stash of heroin to transport, he has a life-scarred look and a soldier of fortune persona — though that’s not the whole story. Ray, who also spent some time on a Southern California commune, has had to struggle to put his personality together, and when Moriarty hands him the dope, we see the terror in Ray’s eyes and his shaky determination to keep himself balanced. He goes through with the escapade out of loyalty to his friend, but he knows it’s bad karma — that it puts him out of touch with who he thinks he is.
In the source novel, “Dog Soldiers,” Robert Stone used the heroin as a metaphor for the way Vietnam had corrupted America, and that may have been what the director, Karel Reisz, intended in his version. But when you watch the movie you get caught up in the details of a drug deal gone sour, and the metaphor pretty much vanishes. Still, the movie clings to you like the scalding memory of an ugly high, and Nolte’s exploration of this character’s efforts to stay grounded in a world that’s lost its moral compass forms its impassioned core.
Nolte had been a ’60s wild man himself, and he looked it. Both “Who’ll Stop the Rain” and (in a less obvious way) “North Dallas Forty,” which came out the following year, 1979, chronicled the moment when the excesses of the ’60s began to occupy a drastically altered moral landscape. Ray Hicks sticks to an ethic that Vietnam has effectively obliterated, and Phil Elliot, the football hero of “North Dallas Forty,” wants to play solely for love of the game, while his bosses operate out of a heartless corporate vision to which the players are inevitably sacrificed. Both these movies are built around the tension between Nolte’s characters and the world they move in; both these men are scrupulously honest, honest in ways that punish them.
And for both of them, the proof of that honesty is physical — it’s the capacity to continue to march toward a rendezvous even after you’ve been badly shot up, or the satisfaction of working through the pain to reach the limit of what your body can achieve. In the memorably funny opening scene of “North Dallas Forty,” Nolte’s Phil pulls himself out of bed, every muscle clearly aching; he staggers across the floor, holding his stomach and his wrist, barely able to move his feet; he washes down a pain killer with stale beer; he sinks into a warm bath, hauling on a joint as if he were inhaling oxygen; and he grins happily as he recalls a heroic play from yesterday’s game. And that’s Phil Elliot in a nutshell: He proves himself to himself by offering up his body, and God, it feels good.
And in a way, that’s how Nolte himself works. “His big, rawboned body suggests an American workingman jock,” Kael writes, “but he uses his solid flesh the way Jean Gabin did: he inhabits his characters. He’s such a damned good actor that he hides inside them. That’s his sport.”
You learn much of what you need to know about the men he plays by reading the body code — the bruised fighter’s stance he takes, as Tom Wingo in “The Prince of Tides,” when he faces off his mother (Kate Nelligan); his restlessness in “I’ll Do Anything,” where he plays an actor striving not to show how desperate he is for a part; the way he plunges at his canvases in “Life Lessons,” a rock-and-rolling action painter who brings a sexual energy to his work, while Bob Dylan and Procol Harum provide his personal soundtrack; the shift in his tempo in “Under Fire” when Russel Price is transformed from a cynical observer to a revolutionary.
In “Weeds,” he plays a convict who finds, in writing and directing plays, a way out of his despair and, eventually, a way out of prison. For this role Nolte adopts an ambling walk, what I’d call a Steinbeck walk — acutely conscious, close to the earth, with a tense swing because he’s accustomed to meeting obstacles but he’s damned if they’re going to stop him from covering ground.
When Lee Umstetter (the role is based loosely on Rick Cluchey, the San Francisco ex-con actor-director) strips down to make love to his girlfriend on his first night of freedom, he reveals a demon tattoo on his chest. It’s the ineradicable mark of what he used to be, but it’s at odds with the wonderment in his eyes — what, in the movie’s view, he’s become.
Later in the film, the troupe he’s assembled from his ex-con buddies runs into financial trouble, so as a last resort he slips off to rob a convenience store. But he can’t do it — sitting in his car with a stocking mask distorting his face, Nolte still manages to convey what this reversion means to him, and how much it means to him to fight against it.
This physical expressiveness is as much a Nolte trademark as the beery husk of a voice, the hushed vocal intensity. He rarely makes the choice to shout a big scene; that would be too obvious and, as he tells Mel Weiser, he hates doing the obvious. Besides, you get so much more color in a quiet, held-perilously-in-check moment than you do in a loud one.
Then there’s that rough-hewn, all-American face, which can look battered and sensitive at the same time (as it does for his cop’s role in “48 Hrs.”), or can take on a slightly dissipated Southerner’s charm (in “The Prince of Tides”) or a conscious Yankee ruggedness (as the crusading private eye in “Everybody Wins”).
In “Affliction,” which won him both the New York Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics awards last year, his face looks distinctly ’50s — it’s the sort of face you might see in an old photograph and be haunted by, the face of a man who fights a losing battle to keep himself from falling off the end of the world. And certain scenes in “Affliction” bring out a boyish sweetness and vulnerability that is also, I’d say, a Nolte characteristic.
His other trademark is professional: his celebrated abhorrence of the mainstream. Yes, he’s made some standard Hollywood crap — like “I Love Trouble” with Julia Roberts, and “Three Fugitives,” not to mention the sequel to “48 Hrs.” — but it takes up only a fraction of his risumi, and he’s well known for turning down projects that promise him lucrative salaries if he doesn’t respect the director or find the material interesting. He’s drawn to writers and directors he believes behave like artists, and his instincts aren’t always sure. He should have stayed away from Oliver Stone; he shouldn’t have played Thomas Jefferson for James Ivory. He shouldn’t have done Scorsese’s feverous remake of “Cape Fear” or tried to play a bespectacled Italian in a grand operatic style in “Lorenzo’s Oil.”
But his instincts have also netted him more sensational roles than most movie stars have had. And even his bad movies tend to be bad in unusual ways — John Milius’ “Farewell to the King,” “Mother Night” (a Kurt Vonnegut adaptation), the new “Simpatico” (based on a Sam Shepard play), even the repugnant “Q & A” aren’t like the lousy projects Tom Hanks or Bruce Willis may choose. There’s a fearless recklessness about an actor who elects to play a champion “equal opportunity hater” like the corrupt police lieutenant Mike Brennan in “Q & A,” who bullies a gay hustler into bending over for him and then garottes him. I hated seeing Nolte in this role, because playing a man with a rotted soul reduces him, and you don’t believe him anyway — he can’t erase the sensitivity in the pockets of his face.
But to get to the heart of Nick Nolte, you have to see that the daring and unconventionality that lead him to a misbegotten project like “Q & A” also land him on a terrific project like “Weeds” or “Under Fire” or Paul Mazursky’s “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” where Nolte plays a homeless man wandering the streets of Beverly Hills who’s adopted by a wealthy family after he tries to drown himself in their pool.
The quality of Nolte’s performances in two high-profile 1998 Christmas releases, “Affliction” and “The Thin Red Line,” rallied the critics behind him, and he’s probably more highly respected now than he’s ever been. Through the years, however, he hasn’t always been taken seriously by the press. Perhaps that’s because he used to like to appear for interviews in pajamas and spin elaborate tall tales. He told Cosmopolitan, for instance, that his first wife was a trapeze artist, and several publications recorded his claim that he once lived in a Mexican whorehouse. His behavior in interview situations has often betrayed his contempt for the publicity process, as well as a holdover hipster rambunctiousness that used to surface regularly when he drank or took drugs. (He’s made no secret of being a recovering alcoholic.)
On the other hand, you don’t see him on talk shows after a movie of his has fizzled at the box office, groveling to apologize to his fans — obeying the Hollywood reflex to distance yourself from a bomb. Weiser, in an oddly ungenerous reading of Nolte’s defense of the critical and financial fiasco “I’ll Do Anything,” claims that the actor has “a remarkable capacity for self-delusion. It’s as if he’s incapable of admitting an association with failure, as if such an admission diminishes him, personally, not his talent, but his very being.”
Maybe Weiser should take another look at “I’ll Do Anything” — maybe it’s time everybody did. Columbia planned this movie as a 1993 Christmas release, with James Brooks directing and songs by Prince, choreographed by Twyla Tharp. But audiences booed at the studio previews, so the numbers were hacked out, and by the time the movie came out in early 1994, it was blighted by the buzz of failure. It’s a wonderful movie, though — a scrambled, sweet-and-sour view of Hollywood with a loose enough weave to allow the performers (Nolte, Albert Brooks, Julie Kavner, Joely Richardson) to experiment with their roles.
Wearing sublime casuals designed by Marlene Stewart, Nolte plays actor Matt Hobbs, who is so gentle and affable that it takes you a moment to realize that these qualities are wrapped like a cozy blanket around an essential narcissism. When his wife (Tracey Ullman) leaves him, taking their baby girl out of the state, he finds it easier to stay in L.A. and live the life of the eternally hopeful than to make time for visits. Then suddenly Ullman’s character lands in jail and he’s stuck with Jeannie (Whittni Wright) — who’s now 6 years old. The arc of Matt’s development is clear: He has to learn to think beyond his own needs. What makes the movie so original is the juxtaposition of the life he leads with Jeannie with the world of the studio, where narcissism is rampant.
Nolte gives one of the funniest, most subtly nuanced and most accurate portrayals of an actor I’ve ever seen. In the early scenes, he seems to be parodying his own days as a pretty boy; later he parodies the Method. It’s a loving send-up, like Dustin Hoffman’s in “Tootsie.” These are actors whose Method preparation, after all, is famous: Nolte lived among the homeless for a while before shooting “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” and in the scene where he entices his hosts’ neurotic dog into eating his supper by lapping dog food out of his bowl, that’s really what he’s eating.
“I’ll Do Anything” contains an uproarious sequence in which Matt auditions for a bored director who immediately walks out of the room and lets his producer (Brooks), a tasteless blowhard, supervise. You can see Nolte’s Matt searching around for a hook into this guy, a way to read his hysterical outbursts, to maintain some dignity and sensibility without pissing anyone off. Nolte and Brooks don’t miss a trick.
Along with “Weeds” and Karel Reisz’s 1990 “Everybody Wins,” “I’ll Do Anything” is the neglected jewel among Nolte’s movies. No one went to see “Everybody Wins,” either. It’s a delicately shaped film noir in which Nolte is seduced by the most unexpected of femme fatales — Debra Winger as a Marilyn Monroe type (Arthur Miller wrote the script) with multiple personality disorder. (“I, like, break up,” is the way she explains her puzzling behavior.)
Nolte and Winger had already done one movie together — a deadly adaptation of Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row,” eight years earlier — and they didn’t bring anything out in each other there; in “Everybody Wins,” though, he gets so caught up in her sexual energy that he spends some of the movie looking like he was bopped on the head in the dark.
Nolte’s Tom O’Toole is an investigator known for taking on lost causes — he’s also a Catholic with an aggravated sense of mission — and for his delight in making the public prosecutor look like an idiot. Winger’s Angela Crispini offers him the chance to free an innocent man convicted of murder and dangles the image of corruption in high places, while she’s coming on to him at the same time.
In traditional film noirs, the hero is either a private eye with a smart take on the case or else a dupe who’s manipulated by the femme fatale; Nolte’s Tom O’Toole is a combo — a duped shamus. This (dark) comic setup makes it easy for us to undervalue what Nolte does in the role, but the movie wouldn’t work without his sensitivity and his wit.
Nolte’s acting galvanizes the touching “Weeds,” and he’s the only actor (among at least a dozen gifted ones) who’s able to deliver a performance of any shape and clarity in Terrence Malick’s incoherent “The Thin Red Line” — he cobbles together a persuasive portrait of a bullish colonel whose every move is motivated by his desire for the generalship he feels is owed him.
He carries off some amazing effects in Paul Schrader’s “Affliction,” a project he helped to initiate, though the material finally defeats him. “Affliction” is a thesis picture, set on proving that the small-town cop Nolte plays is doomed to turn into his violent, alcoholic dad (James Coburn). Nolte gets at the terror and despair deep inside this rough hunk of a man, who’s struggling against his impulses; if he could just give up the battle, he’d be less miserable, but as it is he can’t settle himself. As long as Nolte’s Wade resides in the area of this conflict, the performance is superb, and his scenes with Sissy Spacek (who plays his supportive girlfriend), and with Brigid Tierney as his daughter, who means so much to him but whom he can’t talk to without straining every muscle in his face, are plausible in every detail. But when the movie gets where it’s going and Wade explodes, even Nolte’s intensity and conviction can’t save it.
If I had to choose my favorite Nick Nolte performance, it might be “The Prince of Tides,” where he’s almost good enough to make us forget the preposterous plot about the repressed Southerner who’s called upon to tear away the veils of his own past as a way of helping a therapist heal his suicidal sister. (This movie must have had shrinks howling in the aisles.)
Or “Life Lessons,” where Dobie’s sexual obsession with his assistant takes him to hilarious and piteous heights, The performance is like an unbroken series of arias.
Or it might be Roger Spottiswoode’s 1983 movie “Under Fire” — perhaps the most extraordinary project the actor has ever been involved in — where he does his most physically eloquent acting in the role of a man who always responds first with his body — his eye, his instinct for getting the best photo, charges his muscles; he operates his camera seemingly by reflex.
When a young Sandinista who’s made a connection with Russel is killed before his eyes, though, he doesn’t reach for his camera, and that signals a profound change in this man. All of Nolte’s big scenes “Under Fire” rely on the depth and color he brings to tiny phrases or to silences; the idea is that what Russel goes through in the course of this narrative is beyond words.
It’s a clichi that our most beloved stripped-down action heroes — our Gary Coopers and John Waynes and Steve McQueens — are walking illustrations of the Hemingway dictum that action is character. Nolte gives us more — active physicality without spareness. With him, action is character plus feeling.
Showtime’s hit drug dramedy “Weeds” returns tonight for its 7th season. When we last left matriarch Nancy Botwin, she had turned herself in to the police for the murder of corrupt Mexican politician Pilar, who was actually killed by her son Shane, who was … you know what? Maybe this would be easier if we started at the beginning.
We’ve gone through every season of “Weeds” and boiled each one down to its most important plot points. It’s all the fun of playing catch-up, without any of the boring subplots involving Doug and Celia.
Weeds: Season 1
Nancy Botwin: Selling large quantities of marijuana is the only way I can support my family after the tragic death of my husband. I’m a pretty good mom, all things considering.
Celia: You’re my best friend but I hate you.
Nancy: Ditto. Have you seen my kids anywhere?
Drug dealer: No, but would having sex with me help?
Nancy: Sure.
DEA Agent Peter Scottsman: Want to get married?
Nancy: That seems like a good idea.
Weeds: Season 2
Nancy: I’m not sure if this relationship is heading in the right direction.
Andy Botwin: Would having sex with me help?
Nancy: No.
Conrad: Would having sex with me help?
Nancy: Sure.
Silas: Mom?
Nancy: Not now.
DEA Agent: Good luck with that Mexican standoff with the Armenian mob and the head of the local gang I orchestrated in your kitchen, you bitch.
Armenian hit men: Good luck being dead.
Silas: I threw all your weed into the pool stole all of your supply. Also, I’ve been sleeping with a deaf girl this whole season.
Nancy: Not now, Silas.
Weeds: Season 3
Doug: Building another suburb one town over will ruin the unique individuality of the Agrestic community.
Matthew Modine: Have you listened to your theme song lately?
Nancy: I’m being blackmailed by my dead husband’s ex-wife, as well as being trailed by the DEA.
Matthew Modine: Would having sex with me help?
Nancy: Sure.
Mary-Kate Olsen: I’m acting!
Nancy: Time to burn this to the ground.
Weeds: Season 4
Albert Brooks: You can stay at my house as long as you smother my mother in her sleep.
Nancy: Fine.
Andy: I’m going to start smuggling illegal immigrants over the border.
Nancy: Fine.
Shane: I’m developing severe mental problems.
Nancy: Fine.
Guillermo: I will pay you a lot of money to never go down into this mysterious tunnel located in the back room of a maternity store.
Nancy: No deal.
Shane: Is it weird to lose your virginity in a threesome at 13?
Nancy: Not now, Honey, Mommy is having sex with the corrupt mayor of Tijuana.
Esteban: Also I dabble in drugs and human-trafficking. No big deal.
Nancy and the DEA: Wrong.
Andy: I love you, Nancy.
Nancy: I’m pregnant and about to be murdered by the father of my child.
Silas: Happy birthday, me.
Weeds: Season 5
Esteban: Since you’re pregnant with my son, I can’t kill you. Let’s get married.
Nancy: Can someone take my other kids for a hot sec while I move to Mexico?
Andy: I’m kind of having a mental breakdown over here.
Nancy: Would having sex with my sister help?
Esteban: How do you feel about home births?
Nancy: Not a fan.
Shane: Did anyone notice that I got shot in the arm?
Nancy: Not now, Shane. Help me, Dr. Alanis Morissette!
Shane: (Kills Mexican political leader with mallet) Do I have your attention now, Mom?
Weeds: Season Six
Nancy: We have to go on the lam to protect my new baby from Esteban. Road trip?
Andy: Why did you kidnap the baby?
Nancy: Because family comes first.
Everyone laughs
Nancy: Get in the goddamn van.
Mark-Paul Gosselaar: Would having sex with me …
Nancy: Sure.
Richard Dreyfus: How about me?
Nancy: Um.
Andy: Who wants to go to Copenhagen?
Esteban: Surprise! Not Nancy!
Nancy: Surprise! I called the police on myself!
Andy, Silas and Shane: Finally.
TV today is very dark. We long ago replaced lovable stepmoms like Abby from “Eight Is Enough” with self-involved, irresponsible, adulterous moms and swapped out tirelessly righteous crime-fighters like Kojak with corrupt cops struggling to keep their atrocities hidden. Almost 40 years after Mary Tyler Moore brought her lovably haphazard but principled schtick to the workplace, our TV offices are populated by elitist corporate bosses, lazy, self-serving underlings, vaguely pathetic managerial chumps and endless variations on the vainglorious jackass.
While our TV shows paint us all as easily distracted, neurotic, spoiled, grumpy human beings, we chuckle along as if we’re above it. “Ah yes, a dark comedy — a warped, overly cynical take on life!” we say, then blow off even more work to troll the Internet for something shallow or despicable or depraved to distract us from our lazy, irritable, vainglorious selves.
Drugs, not hugs
“Quiet and mean, those are my people. I don’t do chatty.” — Nurse Jackie
Imagine if Carmela Soprano woke up this morning, got herself a gun, and blew Tony Soprano’s head off. Then, picture Carmela selling her McMansion, cutting up her credit cards, cutting her hair short, throwing out her make-up, and moving to Manhattan to take a job as a kick-ass vigilante nurse, happy to break the rules whenever it means helping ordinary, everyday people to make it through a hard time.
But in this age of darkness, we can’t very well stop there, now, can we? Next, we give Carmela a nasty addiction to pain pills, a self-involved doctor friend who takes her out to expensive sushi lunches, a pharmacist lover who slips her free Vicodin, and a sweet husband and two little daughters waiting at home, unaware of Mommy’s secret life.
“That doesn’t sound like Carmela at all!” you say? Exactly. Welcome to Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie” (premieres 10:30 p.m. Monday, June 
a new half-hour dramedy that’s more drama than comedy, showcasing Edie Falco’s numerous charms outside of the realm of suburban Mafia angst. Jackie Peyton is a (mostly) good egg with a sharp tongue who doesn’t do chatty but who’s willing to go to any length to alleviate her patients’ suffering.
“Doctors don’t heal, they diagnose. We heal,” Jackie tells newbie nurse Zoey (Merritt Wever), but doesn’t fully explain her policy of healing her patients by any means necessary, whether it translates to protecting them from uncaring hospital administrators, stealing drugs for them, allowing their children into the E.R., respecting their requests to decline treatment or putting a cocky but negligent doctor in his place.
When she’s not preventing the system from crushing the sick and uninsured, Jackie is crushing Percocet into her morning coffee. She may have started taking the pills to treat chronic back pain she developed from being on her feet all day, but now it’s clear that Jackie is hooked. Against the backdrop of an incredibly difficult, hectic, largely thankless job, it’s obvious what the pills give her: an ability to beat back the darkness and cope with whatever unpredictable, messy challenges get wheeled into her E.R. next.
Jackie navigates her world with a dissatisfied smirk plastered on her face, like she’s steeling herself in anticipation of the next blow. Every now and then, though, her eyes grow wide with empathy, and we see how much she cares. Once the moment passes, Jackie returns quickly to the picture of no-nonsense efficiency, instructing rookie nurse Zoey not to be so cheery and not to say hi so many times a day, or informing her that only idiots and magicians say “Ta da!” In another actress’s hands, this would constitute an implausible tightrope walk, but Falco lends Jackie grit, compassion and an unapologetic, frank flavor of selfishness. This is the toughest sort of character to play, an impossible knot of contradictions, at once funny, kind-hearted, dismissive and slightly nihilistic. It’s easy to see why Falco chose this role.
The colorful range of characters around Jackie are equally entertaining, from her close doctor friend Eleanor O’Hara (Eve Best), who’s more concerned with pricey lunches and expensive clothes than her patients (albeit in an likeably edgy, British Catherine Keener sort of way) to Mohammed De La Cruz (Haaz Sleiman), a fellow nurse who alternates between supporting Jackie and giving her a hard time. Their cynicism is counterbalanced by the dorky, tiptoeing cheer of Zoey, whose irritating interruptions often serve as a somewhat naive but necessary voice of reason among the world-weary longtime denizens of the E.R.
But even with such a jaded and narcissistic circle of friends, Jackie’s affair with Eddie the pharmacist (Paul Schulze, who also played Edie Falco’s priest love-interest on “The Sopranos”) is tough to parse. Maybe Jackie started sleeping with Eddie to get more pain pills once her legitimate prescription wore out, but now she genuinely loves him — or at least she seems to in the first episode. Obviously an affair is within the realm of possibility, even for a morally upright person like Jackie. But once you meet her handsome, adoring husband Kevin (Dominic Fumusa) and her two young daughters, the whole picture gets a little confusing. Yes, it would’ve been a cop-out to make either her husband or Eddie unlikeable. But to present a stridently self-righteous, smart, reasonable woman who’s sleeping with two really great guys? That not feasible to me, even with loads of pain pills and an unbelievably stressful job in the mix. Jackie is shocked when Dr. Cooper, a young physician new to the job, grabs her breast and tells her it’s a “Tourette’s response to stress,” but her own response to stress is even more fantastical than his.
Unfortunately, the affair doesn’t make any more sense by the show’s sixth episode than it did by the end of the first. How does someone like Jackie end up constructing a double life for herself? Yes, it’s easy enough to say that this is a side effect of addiction, that it comes with the territory. But after watching half a season of this show, there should be more hints to Jackie’s problems in the mix, beyond the pills. We can see that Eddie may have a more refined, intellectual side than Kevin (who’s a bartender) does. But as long as you’re working with a dark comedy, why not give one or both of the men some obvious flaws, instead of presenting them both as lovable, great guys? There’s something slightly disingenuous about this picture.
TV darkness can take many forms, and after years of watching unnervingly optimistic tripe, it’s more than welcome. But sometimes darkness is used to hide the flaws in a concept that doesn’t completely hold together. Under the cover of darkness, “Nurse Jackie” veers into wild and woolly territory without clarifying its characters’ motivations or its central premise.
Naturally we’re willing to forgive these flaws at first; there are more than enough snappy insults and bad attitudes around to keep us happy for a while. But several threads of the story are picked up and dropped again without warning. Jackie is annoyed when Dr. Cooper (Peter Facinelli) strikes up a friendship with Eddie, but it’s not quite clear why. Jackie looks likely to get into trouble with her boss, Gloria Akalitus (Anna Deavere Smith), but any real consequences are obviously being saved for the last few episodes of the season.
We do get a glimpse of Jackie’s concern for her family when her older daughter, Grace, starts staying up late obsessing about the bubonic plague. Her teacher calls Jackie and Kevin into a conference to tell them Grace has been drawing drab pictures with no sun in them. Jackie is defensive at first, but later asks, “Who draws Florida with no sun? It’s the goddamn sunshine state!” Instead of agreeing to treat Grace, Jackie draws a bright yellow sun on her picture, demonstrating her attempts to will her problems out of existence. Unfortunately, though, that subplot disappears almost entirely for two episodes, so that we pretty much forget about it.
Obviously if “Nurse Jackie” were more of a comedy and less of a drama, it might not feel like a problem. It’s not as if we demand to understand the motivations and inner workings of Jack Donaghy of “30 Rock” or Michael Scott of “The Office.” But a dramedy faces the unfortunate challenge of having to walk a line between believability and farce. If you really want your show to be character-driven — and there’s no doubt that’s the aim here — you have to make sure the characters make some logical sense. Even if they behave illogically, it should all fit together, however sloppily, into some form the audience can connect with.
Showtime is a sucker for half-hour dramedies with an appealingly modern, smart tone: “United States of Tara,” “Weeds,” even the relatively disappointing “Californication” appeared stylish and fun at first. But clever quips and absurd, edgy plots that lead nowhere are getting harder and harder to rally around. As the first season of “Tara” drew to a close, something about Tara’s (Toni Collette) self-consciously casual-cool demeanor started to make her feel far less authentic than her relatively whimsical, absurd alternate personalities. Similarly, “Weeds,” which begins its fifth season the same night “Nurse Jackie” premieres, constantly threatens to spiral into such darkness that it’ll never find its way out again. While Doug and Andy and the boys always have their high times to cut the tension, this season a pregnant Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker) finds herself trapped in a severely twisted relationship with a menacing Mexican drug lord who, through gritted teeth, threatens her into seeing a Spanish-speaking gynecologist of his choosing. Ha. ha. Hysterical.
The point is, unlike the family sitcom or the procedural drama, the half-hour dramedy genre is relatively young, and that shows in its wobbly plot lines, unsteady character development and unfocused premises. For all of its charms, “Nurse Jackie” needs to offer a little more than an enigmatic nurse and a parade of clever grouches. Sometimes rather than seeking out thoughtful ways to address and resolve the questions and problems they presented at the start of the season, TV writers today hide behind witty quips, lovably flawed characters and the chaos of a morally unsteady universe. In other words, they do what we do: When confronted by complexity, they hide behind insults. It works for a while, but then some larger guiding principle has to come into play. Even to the most pessimistic among us, the darkness gets a little old if there’s no sense of order or redemption to balance it out. When will TV pull out of its current nose dive into the inky abyss and find some new flavor of sweetness and light to believe in? Would it kill them to draw a shiny, yellow sun into the picture for a change?
Modern life has a frustrating way of setting us up to fail seconds after we wake up. I didn’t exercise this morning, and neither did my dogs, who sulked instead. I drank caffeine, which is bad for me, and wrote for a few hours instead of vacuuming the living room floor. I didn’t shower. I drove my daughter to daycare and she didn’t cry when I left, but I didn’t spend the day with her. I walked the dogs but didn’t run because I still have a cough, which must mean I’m doing something wrong. I paid some bills but didn’t clean off my desk. I watched a screener of “Nurse Jackie” but didn’t figure out what its central premise is. I made dinner but my daughter only ate bread. The baby nursed for an hour (good) then spent an hour sleeping in her automatic swing while I ate chocolate and watched “Make Me a Supermodel” (bad). I took my vitamins but didn’t floss. I wrote this paragraph, but I’m pretty sure most of you won’t like it, since it means waiting longer to find out what time “Jon & Kate Plus 8” is on (9 p.m. Mondays on TLC).
Each year, we nurture hopes that summertime will provide a respite from the impossible expectations of modern life. Even if we have very few vacation plans and tend to work just as hard during the summer, we still stubbornly imagine ourselves with sun-streaked hair, breezing around in linen pants, reading great novels while sipping on icy, fresh lemonade poured from a nearby pitcher. There are no dirty rugs or sulking dogs or neglected babies in our summer fantasies. But the truth is that most of us spend our summers the way we spend the rest of the year: watching “Weeds” and “Project Runway” and “So You Think You Can Dance” while the baby rocks in her automatic swing, patiently awaiting the birth of self-awareness and its accompanying pervasive sense of failure.
The living is queasy
Aw, come on! Darkness and pessimism can be invigorating, fun, even! You just have to lean into the horribly oppressive alienation of our sad little lives in this impoverished modern era, then you’ll catch the spirit. Catch that spirit, everybody!
Just look at “Nurse Jackie” (premieres 10:30 p.m. Monday June 8 on Showtime), an unremittingly dark half-hour comedy with a premise I haven’t figured out yet (but which I’m contractually obligated to figure out by next week). Jackie (Edie Falco) is a very effective and efficient nurse with a handsome husband and two adorable daughters. She also has a serious pill problem, a lover who doesn’t know she’s married, and an unnervingly cynical, hopelessly bleak worldview. Jackie demonstrates very clearly that there’s real joy to be found in darkness. She also demonstrates just how irresponsible and wrong the modern urge to put yourself first can be. Jackie is the sort of flawed heroine who’s made for a world in which self-involved doctors consume sushi lunches while their patients suffer, and bad mothers stick their babies in automatic swings with the soothing “cricket” sounds turned on so loud that their toddler daughters ask, “Where are the crickets?”
At any rate, “Nurse Jackie” is my new favorite show of the summer, so don’t miss it. It comes on right after my old favorite show of the summer, “Weeds,” which returns for a fifth season next week (premieres at 10 p.m. Monday, June 8, on Showtime). Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) — see also: the most selfish mommy in the known universe — is back and worse than ever. She’s pregnant with a Mexican drug lord’s baby and her kids are starting to hate her outright. If she keeps it up, she’ll end up like Celia Hoades (Elizabeth Perkins), who’s been kidnapped by her own (abusive, bitter) daughter, Quinn, only no one cares about her enough to pay the ransom. Congratulations to Showtime, for boldly going where no cable network has gone before in bringing us the Selfish Mom Hour. Selfish moms everywhere salute you!
Yes, I recognize that just because you’re a mom and you’re selfish, that doesn’t mean that you’re plucky and cute and people should care what you have to say. Instead, think of the Selfish Mom as an archetype, one that serves as a conduit for all of our self-flagellating and thwarted expectations in these trying, alienated times. Having been flooded with too much information on the “right” way to do everything under the sun, we all find ourselves falling short of the mark, over and over again, each day. This must be why shows like Bravo’s “Project Runway” (premieres Aug. 20) and “Top Chef Masters” (premieres 10 p.m. Wednesday, June 10) exist — so we can feel a cathartic purging of self-hatred as we watch professionals flailing their way through impossible challenges and, time and again, failing miserably. They become wildly unprofessional, cursing and sweating and lashing out defensively. Reduced to a jumble of nerves, they begin repeating self-hating mantras for the camera: I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough, and people don’t like me! Meanwhile, at home, we feel oddly calm and relaxed for the first time all day.
Since Bravo’s “Project Runway” replacement, “The Fashion Show” (10 p.m. Thursdays), hasn’t been nearly as lively or as compelling as the genuine article, you have to wonder if the spinoff “Top Chef Masters,” which features world-renowned chefs instead of newbies, will have the same charms as the original. At least the producers are the same, and no one will be asked to incorporate silky gray harem pants in five different “looks.” (Aren’t the challenges on “The Fashion Show” awful? This is the worst copy of a good show since the achingly bad Bravo experiment “Step It Up and Dance.”)
Gaylords of the dance
Speaking of dance shows, “So You Think You Can Dance” (currently airing on Fox, check listings) is back this summer (and again in the fall), and while the audition phase is less than compelling, this is one of my all-time summer favorites. Controversy has already plagued (or blessed?) this season of the show, thanks to some dismissive comments judge Nigel Lythgoe made about a pair of male auditioners who ballroom danced their way across the stage together. Lithgoe said that he couldn’t really get into watching two men ballroom dancing. No big surprise there, really: Lythgoe is hopelessly stodgy and closed-minded for a 50-year-old. He also doesn’t like punk rock hairstyles or ripped clothes or self-congratulatory gestures onstage, and he often urges particularly fey dancers to dance in a more manly fashion. If you’re in a forgiving mood, all of the above could be excused as aesthetic preferences, however mired in sociocultural prejudices they might be.
Nonetheless, after outrage was expressed by GLAAD, Lythgoe apologized profusely for his comments, thereby cementing the growing impossibility of being an outspoken asshole in public. Now, is that what we really want, people? Do we really want a world devoid of outspoken assholes? PTA meetings will lose their spark, reality TV will go dark. Who will we jeer at over our pudding cups each night?
Unfortunately, this probably means that “So You Think You Can Dance” will soon lose its delectably dorky, unself-conscious tone (particularly since it’s set to air in a fall prime-time spot on Fox). Yes, Lythgoe and fellow judge Mary Murphy alternate between an open-minded embrace of any heartfelt artistic expression (to the point of shrieking and weeping openly) and a prickly conservative stance that feels horribly out of touch with the times. But that peculiar friction constitutes one of the primary delights of watching this show. What will the horny old choreographer and the ballroom nut job think of this hip-hop routine? Will they throw their hands to the heavens and praise the Lord for such purity of motion, or will they make some unsubtle comments about a dancer’s costume that clearly indicate that Mary thinks she looks too butch, but Nigel wants to do her? This is the Simon Cowell Factor: Their lustful gazes and petty grievances and unfair assessments make us love our favorite dancers all the more feverishly.
At any rate, just know that this show is seriously addictive (if you’re in the market for a new addiction, and who isn’t?). For a more enlightened yet less aesthetically rigorous offering, you might sample the hip-hoppier-than-thou MTV version, “America’s Best Dance Crew” (premieres 10 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 6) with its break-dancing, stunt-sporting, signal-flashing teens. Despite the ne’er-do-well “looks” they sport, Shane Sparks and the other judges recognize that these are good kids, kids who know how to work hard, kids who almost uniformly found meaning in their lives by moving their bodies to the sweet strains of “Let Me See That Booty” and the like. “America’s Best Dance Crew” is sort of the scrappy, younger, ghetto cousin to the ballroom dancing and preteen-girl-focused cheese of “So You Think You Can Dance,” but together they make a complete meal for former dance team geeks, “Solid Gold” fans and general-purpose dance-loving freak jobs nationwide.
Post-dramatic stress syndrome
But we’ve only scratched the tippity top of the glacier of new and returning shows sliding your way this summer. Don’t forget everyone’s favorite freelance spy dramedy “Burn Notice” (9 p.m. Thursday June 4, on USA), which returns with its usual, faintly cheesy, speedy finale resolution. After dropping out of the bad guys’ helicopter into the ocean and swimming ashore, Michael is up to more trouble within minutes, thanks to a hairy assignment from an old friend.
Afterward you can check out “Royal Pains” (premieres 10 p.m. Thursday, June 4, on USA), a new drama about a doctor, Hank, who loses his job and ends up becoming an on-call physician for high society clients in the Hamptons. Now, most USA shows are a little cheesy on the surface, but this one is also filled with cheese, the kind of cheese that frat boys eat late at night when they’re drunk. Like a cross between a dumb version of “House,” a smart version of “90210″ and a modern version of “MacGyver,” “Royal Pains” features lots of hot girls in bikinis, macho emergency doctor maneuvers with plastic baggies and duct tape, and jokes with the word “dude” in them. Hank actually says to his brother, “Do me a favor? Never speak to me again” – and it’s supposed to be funny. Like some of the CW’s less captivating offerings, this show is a cheese pizza with cheese-stuffed crust. But if that sounds tasty, by all means, enjoy!
Do we have “House” or “Grey’s Anatomy” to blame for the fact that medical dramas seem to be making a major comeback? In TNT’s “Hawthorne” (9 p.m. June 16), Jada Pinkett Smith plays a nurse, while Fox’s “Mental” (9 p.m. Tuesdays) is about an unconventional doctor in a psychiatric ward and “The Listener” (premieres 10 p.m. on Thursday, June 4, on NBC) centers around “a 25-year-old paramedic who has a big secret — he’s a telepath.” How original they all sound! Wake me up when it’s over.
AMC’s “Mad Men” isn’t back until August, so let’s distract ourselves with more new shows, none of which sound all that good. “The Philanthropist” (premieres 10 p.m. Wednesday, June 24, on NBC) stars James Purefoy (Mark Antony from “Rome”) as a rich Romeo who becomes a changed man, and “Merlin” (8 p.m. Sunday, June 21, on NBC) is a 13-episode update of the story of the infamous sorcerer in the city of Camelot, “in a time before history began.” Wow, when did history begin, anyway? When jalapeno poppers were invented?
But don’t get so distracted by magic that you forget about the second season of “True Blood” (9 p.m. Sunday, June 14, on HBO), in which we rejoin Sookie, Bill and the rest of the gang for more atypical vampires and stereotypical rednecks. And if Sookie’s Southern belle feels a little aimless, there’s always the focused, ever-hungry, vaguely neurotic energy of Brenda Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) of “The Closer” (returns 9 p.m. Monday, June 8, on TNT).
For those with a thirst for military-themed entertainments, it might be time to peruse the much loved domestic drama “Army Wives” (third season premieres 10 p.m Sunday, June 7, on Lifetime) or the much ignored mystical drama “Kings” (8 p.m. Saturday, June 13-July 25) — which has been canceled, sadly, but NBC is burning off the second half of the season on (cough, cough) Saturdays. I may be all alone, but oh yes, I’ll be watching.
Beyond the fail
Oh sweet Lord, what else, what else? “Entourage” is back in July and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is back in August and this fake cooking show called “Food Party” (premieres 11:15 p.m., June 9, on IFC) is supposed to be funny, plus HBO has some show about a well-endowed young man, aptly titled “Hung” (premieres 10 p.m. Sunday, June 28) (although at first I assumed the guy from “Top Chef” got his own spinoff). It’s all so confusing, there’s just too much TV out there, like that goofy Sci Fi show “Eureka” (9 p.m. Friday, July 10, on Sci Fi) or everyone’s new favorite adventure-job reality show, “Whale Wars” (9 p.m. Friday, June 5, on Animal Planet) or a million other things. I know I’ve failed you by not listing every single show, but for the love of Don Draper, remember, summer is for sipping lemonade and feeling smug about your linen pants! Now go get some stupid linen pants and stop thinking about TV already.
There’s a cafe in my neighborhood where I go to write where everything is all wrong. The tables are the wrong height for the chairs, the chairs are uncomfortable, the walls are covered in bad art, the bad stereo system blares the worst of Journey and Lionel Richie, the breakfast sandwich features over-buttered bread and that fake-smoke-flavor ham, the room is too hot or freezing cold, the teenage cashiers are friendly but inattentive, and a herd of middle-of-the-room flies circles endlessly in the sparsely populated dining area.
Now normally, I might not notice the fake-smoke-flavored ham or the chirpily distracted cashiers, except that the stubborn mediocrity of the place makes me hypersensitive to the countless managerial mistakes unfolding before my eyes. Soon I start to wonder if I’m the only one who’s bothered by the ants crawling across the floors or the strong smell of ammonia in the air or the walls the color of baby poo or the murals depicting local sights, murals that look half-finished and that include an illustration of the front of the restaurant itself.
But there’s another, more corporate place nearby where everything is right. The tables and chairs are made of smooth wood and are perfectly placed, the menu is tastefully designed, the lighting makes everyone look like models at a photo shoot, classical music soothes patrons from a safe distance, cool breezes blow in the open French doors, and the small cup of gazpacho they serve has little slices of melon and a dab of pesto in it. Delightful! But it’s always crowded with people who have expensive haircuts and alarmingly nice shoes, so you end up waiting a long time for a table, and then sit in a corner alone, savoring an $8 cup of gazpacho while wondering, “What does she do to afford those shoes?”
As repellent and deeply wrong as the local cafe is, the overpriced, meticulously designed corporate eatery seems certain to transform you, slowly but surely, into the kind of person who pays too much for haircuts and shoes, the kind of person who experiences gazpacho that doesn’t have a little dab of pesto in it the way the rest of us experience a herd of middle-of-the-room flies. And therein lies the paradox of American upward mobility: The higher you climb, the thinner the air gets, until you can barely breathe. You become like Julianne Moore in “Safe,” suffering from a nervous breakdown when the delivery guys bring a black couch instead of the white one she ordered. You become the kind of hothouse flower who only feels comfortable in perfectly calibrated, beautiful spaces, the kind of person who’s never satisfied and can’t play nicely with others.
Keepin’ it real estate
Which brings us to the best comedy on television right now: “Flipping Out” (10 p.m. EDT Tuesdays on Bravo), in which “real estate investor” (aka flipper) Jeff Lewis parades his apparent personality disorders in front of the camera for all to see.
“Flipping Out” bestrides the professional-entrepreneur reality show genre like a colossus. This isn’t just another “Blow Out” or “Work Out,” nor is it merely one of those shows aimed at allowing catty viewers to feel superior to the sad sacks depicted therein. No. “Flipping Out” is a work of pure comic genius. “Flipping Out” is the new “Curb Your Enthusiasm” — only better.
Like Larry David, Jeff Lewis is always trying to get the upper hand on his apparent sociopathic or narcissistic or obsessive-compulsive urges. He calmly explains, in the show’s second season premiere, that he’s really trying to take things more lightly and not sweat the small stuff these days. Then he has this exchange with his assistant Jenni regarding the precise temperature of the latte she just fetched him.
Jeff: Is this 140 [degrees]? Really?
Jenni: Yeah.
Jeff: Honestly, I think it’s like 150 or 155. It’s not 140.
Jenni: She said out loud 140.
Jeff: It’s not 140.
Jenni: Is it too hot?
Jeff: It’s 150.
Jenni: It’s 140! Come on!
Jeff: It’s not 140! Trust me, I know what 140 is. I drink these every day! (Pause.) But it’s OK. It’s fine. It’ll cool off. You know what? I’m not going to worry about it. I’m not going to worry about it.
Jenni: Good.
Long pause.
Jeff: But what’s interesting is, it doesn’t say 140 on here.
Jeff Lewis has impeccable comic timing. He knows when to pause. He knows when to lower his voice. He’s perfected the art of the tag line. He’s exactly the sort of tortured tragicomic character who belongs in a Jonathan Franzen novel. He tries so hard to overcome his flaws and compulsions, but he never quite succeeds.
If the first season of “Flipping Out” introduced Jeff’s struggle to thrive as an entrepreneur in a world that has never lived up to his expectations, the second season of the show is the perfect sequel to the first. With the real estate market in a slump, Jeff has been forced to take on consulting work with a boss who’s richer, more powerful and possibly even more difficult than he is.
“He [Jeff] shows up to a job site for 30 minutes a day and screams and yells at people,” says business partner and ex-boyfriend Ryan. “And now all of a sudden he’s in this world where he can’t just fire his answer right back at somebody, or scream and yell at somebody.”
Ryan is the ultimate straight-man sidekick who’s there to set up Jeff’s best punch lines. Ryan draws Jeff out, and Jeff obligingly rambles on about his psychological state, like he did during a business lunch with Ryan in the show’s season premiere last week.
Jeff: So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I’ve been kind of, like, really mellow this week? Like I said the other day, I feel like I’m medicated but not medicated? (Excitedly) I think I’m depressed. I think I’m actually depressed! And I’ll tell you why: I feel like I was on top of the world. I feel like we were flipping all these homes, six at a time, making a ton of money, I’m my own boss. And now, it’s like everything’s changed. At what point did I become a prostitute? Because that’s what I feel like. And I’m depressed. I’m seriously depressed!
Ryan tells Jeff to suck it up and put his ego aside, but Jeff won’t have any of it. “I’m being punished. God’s punishing me. I’ve seriously thought about that. I mean, I don’t think God screwed up the real estate market to punish Jeff Lewis. I’m not that much of a narcissist.”
Oh, yes, you are, Jeff. Don’t be shy about it now!
By the way, remember the reader mail for this column last week, where some readers claimed that Americans think that they’re whores when they deign to do work that’s not purely creative and inspired and free from the tedious limits of commerce? Well, Jeff certainly supports that argument.
But Jeff isn’t just incorrigible. He isn’t just neurotic. He isn’t just insufferable. Like any great character, he’s unpredictable and complicated and, at times, even a tiny bit likable. Jeff Lewis belongs with Tony Soprano and Nate Fisher and Don Draper in the pantheon of TV’s most fascinating antiheroes. He’s quintessentially American in his habit of wanting far, far too much, more than is good for him. His team of underlings keeps his house as spotless as a showroom under the auspices of keeping the property salable (he always lives in one of his redesigned properties until he finds a buyer for it), filling their days by sweeping up every last leaf on the patio, trimming dead leaves from Jeff’s plants and turning the bottles of water in Jeff’s refrigerator to face the front. Lewis’ obsessive-compulsive tics are indulged, day in and day out, in the name of his profession.
But it’s clear enough that Jeff can’t relax in any environment that isn’t pathologically fastidious. While he might say that his aim is to make enough money flipping houses so he can work less, he’s clearly a workaholic who’s chosen a business that invades every free corner of his life and his time for a reason. His friends are his employees. His home is a perpetual open house. He circles like a shark, picking lint off the couch and wondering what will go wrong next. And when something does go wrong, he’s flooded with emotions he can’t control. One tiny mishap or flaw sends him spiraling downward, convinced that God has it out for him.
And what’s funnier than a depressed, narcissistic obsessive-compulsive? “Flipping Out” charts the slow unraveling of an American archetype: the perfection-fetishist. It’s a cautionary tale for the control freak — which means it should appeal to at least half of the population in this pampered land of ours.
Home by the sea
The other half will relate to Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) of “Weeds” (10 p.m. EDT Mondays on Showtime), absent-mindedly sipping on her lukewarm Frappuccino while batting her eyes at yet another drug dealer who finds a use for her innocent white-lady looks. Although Nancy wants all the same things that Jeff Lewis wants — big piles of cash, pretty stuff, an enormous house by the sea — she can’t be bothered to attend to any of the details along the way. She’s the distracted, ineffectual, largely absent matriarch who wants to figure out some way to avoid working for a living altogether.
Ah, yes. More than the pot cultivation or the drug smuggling or the high banter, nothing offends quite like the unapologetically lazy, irresponsible mother. In America, no one is more loathed and despised than she is. This is a character who could never exist on network TV, even now, in the age of celebrating and embracing the dysfunctional among us. When dads ignore their kids, it’s funny. When moms do it, it’s tragic.
Plenty of people probably can’t tolerate Nancy Botwin, but personally, I get a little charge when she mumbles and whines and rolls her eyes for the millionth time. This woman makes the world safe for sloppy, daydreaming assholes like me, the sorts of people who struggle with recurring urges to hide in the broom closet rather than change another dirty diaper. Even though we’re soothed and comforted by our love and fierce protectiveness of our children, our inner teenagers are still petulant about having to wake up early and refrain from saying “fuck” when the little mimics are within earshot. And while it shouldn’t be considered courageous to suggest that flawed, distracted parents don’t generally end up chaining their kids to toilets in the basement, in these judgmental times, implying such a thing is brave, indeed.
This season, Nancy is a little more bratty than usual, too, having torched her home back in Agrestic in the hopes of getting the DEA off her scent. Her adopted home with a disapproving, somewhat loserly father-in-law, Lenny (played by Albert Brooks! Hallelujah!), will do for now, but Nancy needs to make some big money and fast if she’s going to keep her family satisfied and fed in their new coastal hideaway.
Money is also the key to Lenny’s heart, not surprisingly. “Listen, Bonnie and Clyde,” he says to Nancy and her brother-in-law Andy. “I don’t know what you two are running from, and you know what? I don’t care. Why don’t you just give me $300 in cash, right now, and the subject is dead?” Andy chuckles, but Nancy calmly opens her purse, pulls out $300 in cash, and hands the bills to Lenny.
Meanwhile, Celia (Elizabeth Perkins) is stuck in jail, thanks to the fact that her name is on the title to Nancy’s former grow house. Why is Celia always punished on this show? Last season she was humiliated when she discovered that Nancy was sleeping with her lover, and now she’s being tortured in jail. When she asks about her chances of going free, her disorganized lawyer responds, “Anti-drug crusader caught with grow house? You’re fucked like a stray dog in Chinatown.”
Despite the change of scenery and the welcome addition of Brooks, this fourth season of “Weeds” isn’t all that different from the seasons that came before. Here’s Nancy, being schooled by yet another deeply corrupt but exacting drug entrepreneur. Here are the kids, poised to stir up trouble in whatever misguided ways they can. Here’s Celia, looking to nail Nancy for dumping her as a friend. (I sort of miss the days when those two were friends, don’t you? Nancy could use a good friend, particularly now that her former business partner, Conrad, is out of the picture.)
Even with the same repeating story lines, the truth is I could watch 10 or 12 episodes of “Weeds” in a row, simply to follow Nancy around, slurping on her adult-size sippy cup, cocking her head and trying to figure out a good angle on whatever messed-up situation she’s in at the moment. She’s a hero to our inner teenagers, and we want her to get rich, damn it, rich as royalty! Let’s show the world that irresponsible, lackadaisical mothers are just as entitled to big piles of cash as the tightly wound, obsessive-compulsive workaholics who more typically acquire them.
Besides, it would be interesting, to see what might happen if Nancy became a drug kingpin and got loaded. Would she stop sipping on the dregs of Frappuccinos and insist that they be kept at the perfect icy temperature? Would she hire a full-time nanny and send her kids to pricey private schools? Would she finally have the free time and money to become detail-oriented and fastidious? Would she finally have the free time and money to feel truly, deeply dissatisfied?
After all, that’s the dream, isn’t it? Instead of training our minds to appreciate the little comforts of our humble existences, we yearn to become more and more precious, to surround ourselves with increasingly beautiful things, to hoard our stuff and our free time and our obscene piles of money until all of that beauty and space and meticulous perfection melts into an unbearably inadequate, fly-infested, profane mess.
Here’s to keeping the dream alive!
Mary-Louise Parker as Nancy Botwin. 
Merritt Wever, left, and Edie Falco in "Nurse Jackie." 
From left, images from "Nurse Jackie," "Mad Men," "So You Think You Can Dance" and "True Blood." 
