Nurse Jackie

The "Nurse Jackie" actress talks about her new healthcare play and the inspirations for her Showtime character

By Rahul Parikh

Anna Deveare Smith in "Nurse Jackie"

Chances are you’ve seen some of Anna Deveare Smith’s performances over the past decade. From her recent turn as hospital administrator Gloria Akalitus on “Nurse Jackie” to her portrayal of the president’s national security advisor on the “West Wing,” the actress has become a fixture of smart TV.

Although less well-known, some of Smith’s most critically acclaimed work has unfolded onstage, a medium for which she has written and performed a number of one-woman shows. In her latest work, “Let Me Down Easy,” she portrays 20 characters ranging from Lance Armstrong to former Texas Gov. Ann Richards to a Buddhist monk to medical residents in New Orleans. The play, which she is currently touring around the nation, explores how individuals struggle to survive not only terminal illness but also our nation’s flawed healthcare system.

Smith began mulling this piece over a decade ago, when she was invited to Yale Medical School as a visiting professor. There, she interviewed and then portrayed real patients, doctors and administrators as part of an educational lecture. Intrigued by the idea, she went on to interview more than 300 people in preparation for the current iteration of the project.

Her efforts have paid off. The actress’s in-depth exploration of the doctor-patient relationship results in the most sensitive, informed and emotional work of art I’ve ever seen about health and America’s medical system. In short, if you’re a human and you’ve accepted the fact that you will, at some point, face death, you should see this play. (If you can’t make it in person, PBS will be airing it on Great Performances later this year.)

During her recent stint at the Berkeley Rep, Smith and I sat down to talk about the play and what’s she’s learned about doctors, patients and healthcare in America.

What do you want “Let Me Down Easy” to tell us about death and dying?

It’s not a show just about dying. The play also has a social justice mission to make it clear that if you have a lot of resources you can get care, but if you don’t, you’ll be forgotten. It’s not just about death. It is also about how we live and how we care about each other or not, and who we care about. In terms of death, the play is extremely personal. I’m looking at each member of the audience as a partner in excavating meaning, because more than any other play I’ve done, I understand the audience is bringing very personal material along to watch this play. So it’s a more intimate experience. I don’t know what it is for each person, but I hope that the play gives them the opportunity to work through how they live and how they take care of the people they love.

You mention social justice. The play is going up during the early phases of healthcare reform. Did that affect the production?

The play started a long time ago — at Yale in 2000. Health reform was not a national issue yet. At first, it was just about hearing how patients communicated. I also cast a wide net, looking at the issue around the world.

But when it was time to bring the play to New York, President Obama was rolling out healthcare reform, and that was when I decided to make it a companion piece to the national political debate on healthcare. I wanted to show the human side of the story and cause audiences to talk about how these issues affect them in their daily lives.

Have you had any feedback from leaders on either side of the political aisle?

In Washington a lot of politicians came. Secretary [of Health and Human Services Kathleen] Sebelius invited me to do parts of the play for her staff; Francis Collins, the head the National Institutes of Health, invited me to come and perform there; Supreme Court justices came; a lot of people from the White House and from the president’s Cabinet came to see the play. What I hope the play did for them was to inspire them to keep doing what they’re doing. The play isn’t legislation, but it does move hearts and minds.

Getting back to the play’s theme of illness and dying: At the end of the play, you portray a Buddhist monk who has a clear, simple — almost fatalistic — way of looking at death. How does this compare to the popular view of death in America?

To me the words that mean the most is when that monk says we think about death all the time. But not at all in a morbid way. Rather, he says it just to give all of its richness to every moment of life.

As opposed to our own view, which is to fight to the end?

Well, the prevailing American idea, which would not be a Buddhist idea, is exactly to fight it to the end. We in particular don’t look at [death] or deal with it. But this may be tied into something that is positive about America: the notion of hope and optimism.

How do you think the play affected your own view of doctors and modern medicine?

Medicine itself is a culture and profession. What is clear to me is that science is essential to medicine. But just because you’re a great scientist doesn’t make you a healer. Yes, you might be able to fix something, but it doesn’t mean you can heal a person. I think more health professions may evolve that have more to do with healing as doctors have more and more obligations to keep up with science. As one doctor I talked to said, “We can see inside cells, we can see inside genes, we can do all kinds of things that we never could do before, but it doesn’t mean that we have the capacity to look at the whole person and understand that a disease shatters a whole person’s life.”

Doctors are often viewed either as saviors or witches. Is there a reality behind this?

Doctors are extraordinarily educated people. When I’ve sat with doctors for interviews, I’m impressed at how refined their intelligence is and how analytical they are. I find doctors among the most compelling professional people I’ve ever talked to.

I did read once that society invests in the education of doctors, and if doctors aren’t really going to take care of people, then maybe we should rethink that donation we make to their education. Doctors are in the public trust, and even though they have the public trust, they now have a lot of distrust.

It is probably because of the extent to which medicine is in the marketplace. There’s a dollar sign to every moment of care you get, and [that system] doesn’t seem to be working very well. It doesn’t even allow doctors — many of whom came into the profession because they do want to heal people — to be their best selves. I don’t need to tell you about the need we have in primary care. Folks would rather do plastic surgery or something else that won’t wake them in the middle of the night and [that's] going to make a lot more money. That is a sign of skewed values in our culture. We don’t have a culture of service. We have a culture which is about trying to get as much as you can financially.

What can doctors do to better communicate with their patients?

[Laughs] How much time does a doctor spend looking in your eye unless he’s an ophthalmologist? Even if he or she has 15 minutes, how much of it is he looking in your eye? They’re not looking at you.

The other thing I found profoundly offensive about doctors and probably kept me away from them is that they have no interest in what your own struggle has been with your health. The first thing the doctor who wants to communicate with a patient needs to [think] about is what it means to open him- or herself up to this human being. And if he can’t do that, then maybe he needs to work with someone who does, so patients can have a better experience.

Can these skills be learned?

I think they can be learned. When I was at Stanford, I taught acting and I had lots of young people in my class who were scientists. I saw an artistic side. One of my own doctors is a concert pianist who plays at Carnegie Hall. Doctors are multitalented people who do extracurricular activities that speak to a lot of passion. So I think it can be taught, but [it won't] work if we’re not realistic about how many hours there are in a day. One short-term solution is to focus on teams, so that if one person is the plumber, so to speak, then someone else gives them a feeling of well-being.

On “Nurse Jackie,” you play a hospital administrator, Gloria Akalitus. The stereotypical administrator’s interests are usually opposed to those of the patient. The patient wants the best care, and administrators are portrayed as the ones who are trying to limit care and ration resources. How is this role different than the ones you portray in the play?

Gloria Akalitus is very multisided character, and has a bigger heart than she appears to have on the surface. I always like to say that I bet she teaches kindergarten at Sunday school. I’m sure she’s active at church. So she is a complicated woman. I feel I know her, and the people I base her on are these tough African-American no-nonsense women who raised me. Most of all, Mrs. Akalitus has profound sense of service. That’s the good news about her. Does she come across cold? Yes. Is she representing the system? Yes. All of the characters in “Let Me Down Easy” who survive the system are those that do have lots of resources. [Former Texas Gov.] Ann Richards says it point-blank during the play — “The first thing I thought was, thank God I can afford this” — when she was diagnosed with cancer.

I find it fascinating that you said “survive the system” versus “survive the disease.”

We’re getting somewhere together now. It’s not just about surviving the illness. It’s about psychologically surviving the system.

: Rahul K. Parikh is a physician and writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He wrote the Vital Signs column on Salon in 2008-2009. His pop culture-medical column, PopRx, runs on alternate Mondays. More Rahul Parikh

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How TV illustrates a disturbing medical trend

Shows like "Nurse Jackie" show how easy it is to run needless tests -- and one, in particular, could spell danger

By Rahul Parikh

How TV illustrates a disturbing medical trend

Topics:PopRX, Nurse Jackie

On a recent episode of Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie,” a boy comes in to the emergency room with a handle protruding from his left nostril. The boy, it turns out, has shoved a small mirror into his sinus cavity.

Dr, Cooper (Peter Facinelli) orders an X-ray, but that’s when Nurse Jackie intervenes. “Let’s get him a scan,” she whispers.

Cooper balks. “No, an X-ray is OK.”

But Jackie presses him. “He wants to see his brain,” she says. “Show him his brain.”

Cooper smiles. “Using my powers for good — I like it,” he says, ordering the boy a Computerized Tomography scan, better known as a CT scan. CT scans give doctors the uncanny ability to illuminate cancerous tumors, blockages in blood vessels that cause strokes, an inflamed appendix, and other sicknesses inside the body (though they’re not at all necessary to find plastic stuck in a sinus cavity). They’re X-rays on steroids.

The scene is satire, but it demonstrates how easy it is for doctors to run unnecessary tests on their patients. The scene also had uncanny timing. Just after the episode aired, a study came out showing just how often kids in emergency rooms get CT scans. The real-life answer, as suggested by “Nurse Jackie,” is “a whole lot more than they need.”

According to the study, published online in the journal Radiology, the number of CT scans performed on kids in the emergency room increased a whopping five-fold between 1995-2008, from about 330,000 to almost 1.7 million a year.

And that’s a problem, because CTs expose children to higher levels of ionizing radiation than any medical procedure, raising the risk — ever so slightly but very clearly — that some of those kids will develop cancer in their lifetimes. Here’s how one pediatric surgeon put it: “CT scans are like mini-Hiroshima bombs, four such scans on a kid are equivalent to the radiation exposure that the survivors were subjected to in 1945.”

Statistics suggest that 1 to 2 out of a hundred people who get scanned will get cancer as a result. Kids constitute the highest risk group because they’re young (giving them more time to get cancer) and because their bodies are more sensitive to the radiation that CTs rain on their bodies.

Physicians order volumes of CT scans in kids (and adults, whose number of scans have also increased dramatically over the past two decades) for a multitude of reasons. For one, it’s what we’re taught to do when we learn how to doctor. Residents are rewarded when they assess every nook and cranny of their patient for the disease’s cause and effect. To miss something is to risk being publicly shamed during rounds. So we order tests — a lot of them. When we graduate, we practice no differently than we were taught.

Second, ordering CTs makes business sense. In a health care market where doing more means making more money, CT scanners are big sources of profit. A single scanner costs close to a million dollars. At an operating capacity of 10-15 patients a day (easily exceeded by most hospitals), a hospital or imaging center that invests in one will recoup its costs in about a year. Many doctors also have ownership stakes in the machines or centers to which they refer patients, so their financial incentives to run more scans are aligned like stars. Although the U.S. has the fourth highest number of CT scanners in the industrialized world, we order the most scans.

Third, and this is particularly important for kids, modern scanners are like a drive-thru at McDonald’s: really convenient and fast. The patient lies down on a table that slides through the circular machine that ,even today, looks like it came from the future. Doubtless you’ve seen this in movies and hospital dramas. But the process has simplified dramatically over the years. In the past, CT scans took so long that many children had to be sedated so they wouldn’t move. That required more risk and work on doctor’s part (consult anesthesia, prescribe drugs and monitor the child closely before, during and after the scan). Modern scanners, however, are much zippier. They can get the job done in about a second.

But all that aside, there’s something more profound that’s driving doctors to irradiate more kids in the name of health. Let me illustrate that with the following story.

Early in my career, the father of a 9-year-old girl brought her in with belly pain and vomiting. There was nothing in the child’s history that suggested a problem like appendicitis or a tumor — problems that a CT may have helped to diagnose. In fact, she had seen another doctor earlier who had run blood tests that were completely normal.

I was certain that the child had a case of food poisoning, and I tried to reassure her father. But I was naive to that fact that I wasn’t treating the child’s belly — I was treating this parent’s anxiety. He couldn’t accept my reassurance and demanded a CT scan. When I told him I didn’t think that was right, he began to pressure me. “What would you do if she were your kid?” he asked.

It’s the kind of unpleasant encounter that makes me tense. I felt sympathetic to him, but I held my ground. He eventually relented. But he warned me that if she kept vomiting, he was going to take her to the emergency room for that scan.

I thought about that child and her father all day, even after I went home that night. What if I had been wrong, and I sent that child home with a ruptured appendix, a cancer growing in the walls of her intestine? Should I have ordered that test?

No doubt, doctors have lived with this uncertainty forever. But I practice in the 21st century, a time when patients (or their parents) dislike any ambiguity whatsoever. It’s also a time when shows like “House and “ER” and “Grey’s Anatomy” have given even casual viewers a working vocabulary for specialized medical equipment. Patients may not have a sophisticated sense of what a CT scan does, but they know that it’s important and advanced, that it has a certain prestige and could give them the best, most unambiguous diagnosis possible.

The next morning, I walked into the office anxious, checking to see if that child had ended up in the emergency room. She hadn’t. But ordering that CT scan would have been my security blanket — not to mention a parent pleaser. And in the psyche of doctors who perceive that being wrong equals being sued, we can easily buy ourselves peace of mind by putting pen to paper and writing the order.

Still, even putting aside radiation, there are other reasons why a boost CT scans can be problematic. Ironically, a test like a CT, so good at illuminating subtle details, can lead to further insecurity, work and anxiety for both patient and doctor. Take the following scenario, another one I’ve faced in my career, as I’m sure most doctors have. A teenage patient fell down playing soccer and hit his head. He was taken to the local ER and had a head CT. While there was no evidence of any injury from his fall, he was found to have a cyst in another part of his brain.

Enter the “incidentaloma,” which is medical slang for a serendipitous finding on an imaging test. Incidentalomas are a costly side effect of better technology like CT scanners, and do nothing more than put doctors and patients in a pickle. Once discovered, we’re obligated to do more. In the case of this patient, it meant a referral to a neurologist and an MRI, a test that, though it doesn’t involve radiation, is even more expensive than a CT. In the meantime, the child missed additional days of school, and the child’s parent missed work. The final verdict? The cyst was a normal variant of the child’s brain anatomy.

Getting back to the issue of CT scan and radiation, though, most experts agree that overuse needs to be curbed. If it isn’t, we could face a future public health problem of rising cancer rates, thanks to our medical overzealousness. It’s akin to our realization that excessive antibiotic prescribing created resistant strands of bacteria. Scientists spent the next 20 years educating doctors and the public about those risks. The message seems to have taken: It’s rare that I get a parent in my practice who demands antibiotics. Many, in fact, now question whether their child needs them at all.

We’ve fallen off a similar cliff with CT scans. In a 2004 survey 75 percent of radiologists and ER doctors grossly underestimated the radiation dose from a CT scan. Over half the radiologists surveyed and over 90 percent of emergency-room physicians did not believe that CT scans increased the lifetime risk of cancer.

So what do we do? Educating doctors and patients about the risk of CTs is already underway in many places, as is making sure radiologists know how to fine-tune doses of radiation for kids who get CTs so that they’re subjected to less radiation.

An even better way to curb all this testing would be to keep patients out of the ER unless they really need it. ER doctors are amazing at what they do, but it’s not fair to ask them to try to build a trusting relationship with a patient they’ll probably only see once in their career. That’s best left to someone like me, the primary care doctor. Over time, getting to know a patient or their parent builds comfort and trust. So, when a parent asks me whether or not a child needs a CT scan or any other test, I can give them my honest opinion, and they’ll believe me. That’s also why, despite my story about the child with the belly pain, I generally find myself ordering more tests (CT scans and otherwise) and making more referrals for patients I don’t know as well — much like emergency room doctors. Trust, not technology, really is everything in medicine. It’s the real “power of good,” as the fictional Dr. Cooper puts it, not because it allows not to less or more for our patients, but because it allows us to do the right thing as much as we humanly can.

: Rahul K. Parikh is a physician and writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He wrote the Vital Signs column on Salon in 2008-2009. His pop culture-medical column, PopRx, runs on alternate Mondays. More Rahul Parikh

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“Nurse Jackie” hooks us again

Far from the rehab and reckoning you'd expect, Edie Falco's tough pill-popper starts a new season still in denial

By Heather Havrilesky

Edie Falco in "Nurse Jackie."

Topics:Nurse Jackie, Our Picks, TV, Television

“Nurse Jackie” may be the first show ever made about a drug addict who’s very good at her job while high.

A bold central premise, to be sure, made even bolder by the fact that Jackie (Edie Falco) doesn’t start the second season (premieres 10 p.m. Monday, March 22, on Showtime) in rehab, which is what you might expect after her world almost comes apart at the end of the show’s first season. But then, the show’s first season finale was filled with almosts: Jackie’s lover Eddie (Paul Schulze) almost told her husband, Kevin (Dominic Fumusa), about their affair; Jackie’s boss Gloria Akilitus (Anne Deavere Smith) almost discovered Jackie’s habit of breaking rules (both on behalf of her patients and on behalf of her addiction); Jackie’s older daughter, Grace (Ruby Jerins), almost had a nervous breakdown.

All of which almost made the first season a little disappointing, when taken as a whole. What did we learn about Jackie by the finale that we didn’t know within the first few minutes of the show? There wasn’t much character development — or much of a complete season-long narrative arc for that matter. But the real issue may be that this show is almost a comedy, but not really, because it’s too dark and not funny in the ways traditional TV comedies are. The show is almost a drama, but not really, because the characters aren’t fleshed out enough and the show’s storylines don’t end conclusively the way that a drama’s plotlines would.

Considering, though, that this is a show about an efficient, effective, on-the-job addict, considering that Jackie doesn’t start Season 2 either in a 12-step program or in church, repenting for all of her sins, there may be a reason we should tolerate the close-but-no-cigar style of this story. Thwarting the expectations of the modern dramedy could be part of the point here. When Dr. O’Hara shows up to the hospital on ecstasy and comes on to the new RN, Sam (Arjun Gupta), when Zoey (Merritt Wever) befriends “God,” the man who yells insults at people from his apartment across the street from the hospital, when Dr. Cooper (Peter Facinelli) develops a huge crush on Jackie and Jackie tells him he’s an idiot for the 50th time, that’s the show’s writers telling us that they’re going to choose the paths that they find entertaining or evocative, standard TV storytelling be damned. And when it comes to ridiculous conversations like this one, between Coop and Jackie, you sort of have to admit that they’re on to something:

Cooper: It would be good for us to spend some time …

Jackie: What us? There is no us. I thought we got past this weeks ago.

Cooper: (laughs) Jackie, this whole “come here, go away” thing is exhausting me. I’m just …

Jackie: But there is no “Come here.” It’s all go away. Go away. Just go away!

Cooper: What do I care? Try to do something nice for a nurse, you know, who’s a little bit older than me, by the way.

Jackie: Ok. Thanks a lot. I’m gonna head back to work.

“Nurse Jackie” is like that funny, bad boyfriend who you know will never pop the question. Even though you’ll never get exactly what you want or expect, he’s just too charming and addictive to kick to the curb. Not only is Falco irresistible as the no-nonsense, occasionally aggressive, wildly avoidant woman whom we haven’t come close to understanding yet, but the rest of this clown show bounces along with breathtaking dynamism, teetering precariously between giddiness, rage and existential angst. When Dr. Cooper files a complaint against Jackie to a stern Mrs. Akilitus (who thoughtfully scribbles “World’s Biggest Asshole” on her pad of paper as he’s talking), then he breaks down crying in her office? When Jackie’s lover Eddie shows up at Jackie’s husband’s bar (again) and manically incites an uneasy friendship with him? These are good, tense moments. We may not laugh that much or cry that much, but if that were the whole point, Jackie would’ve entered and left rehab, filed for divorce, quit her job and lost custody of her kids by now.

“Nurse Jackie” walks a more subtle path than that. And really, the second season of this show feels more like the second half of the first season. The same tensions are still growing: Jackie is still addicted, Cooper is still full of love/hate for her, and Eddie is still threatening to blow her double life out of the water by exposing their affair to her husband, and Grace is showing signs of needing more help than her parents, who have a shared interest in denial, are willing to admit that she needs.

Most of all, though, “Nurse Jackie” is a show that, through the patients who show up in Jackie’s emergency room, focuses on the daily slices of joy and sadness that make up a life. Some days are fun, some days are heartbreaking, and it all adds up to a big picture that’s sometimes difficult to look at closely without a hefty dose of pharmaceuticals.

We understand why Jackie needs those pills to get through her day, we just don’t know who the real Jackie is yet. Maybe this season we’ll find out.

: Heather Havrilesky is Salon's TV critic and author of the rabbit blog. Her memoir, "Disaster Preparedness," published in 2010. More Heather Havrilesky

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Going down in flames

L.A. burns, "Nurse Jackie" fizzles and Courteney Cox inhabits a charred shell of her old TV self in "Cougar Town"

By Heather Havrilesky

Edie Falco in "Nurse Jackie," left, and Courteney Cox in "Cougar Town."

Topics:Nurse Jackie, Cougar Town, I Like to Watch, Television

Ah, the many joys of Los Angeles in August! What’s more romantic than a freeway of ants running through the kitchen? What’s more exhilarating than thick clouds of brown smoke, billowing in the hills and threatening untold tracts of overpriced, overleveraged real estate below?

It’s hard not to have a kick in your step on a day like today, when it’s 103 degrees outside, the world is in flames, and even the ants are looting, looking to steal the water that the residents of Los Angeles stole from somewhere else, some lusher place where you nonetheless can’t get a spray tan with your morning doughnut.

I wonder if, so many decades ago, the robber barons of Los Angeles paused in their diligent and important work of bloodily oppressing various indigenous and imported brown peoples to gaze across this scrubby desert basin with a sense of awe at what it might one day become: an enormous maze of pavement, thirsty lawns and overvalued stucco. How proud they might be, to see that their selfless efforts to rape the land and disempower the laboring classes have paid off in acre upon acre of foreclosures, punctuated only by auto body shops and shitty Chinese restaurants! Los Angeles, glorious and vast, land of roof rats, home of the Whopper!

You don’t know Jack(ie)

Yes, I know that L.A. is a thriving metropolis filled with interesting people and good food and breathtaking vistas. But it’s also, occasionally, a stinking, smoky hellhole. To be fair, the smog is nothing like it was back in the early ’90s — except when the hills are on fire. Then the skyscrapers are obscured by dense smoke, the kids and the dogs have to stay inside, and every hour of the day looks like sunset. Sadly, though, the news lady on TV has had so much Botox that she can barely move her mouth, let alone offer up a facial expression appropriate to the spectacle of million-dollar homes engulfed in flames.

This is the ultra-crabby, dystopic perspective I bring to the finale of “Nurse Jackie,” which I cannot, in good faith, allow to pass without comment. Because like Los Angeles, which either looks green and charming or overheated, smoggy and plagued by its ill-considered, unsustainable nature, “Nurse Jackie” is alternately winning and pointless, witty and painful, spirited and wildly frustrating.

Sure, we could rave about how convincingly Edie Falco inhabits her role as a devil-may-care E.R. nurse with a drug habit and an unfortunate propensity for cheating on her perfectly wonderful husband with a nice-guy pharmacist. We could discuss Eve Best’s delicious turn as the unrepentantly self-centered Dr. O’Hara, or Anna Deavere Smith’s almost cartoonish take on unforgiving hospital bureaucrat Mrs. Akalitus.

Or, we could muse about the sociocultural ramifications of not one, not two, but three TV shows about nurses on the schedule this summer and fall, from Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie” to TNT’s “Hawthorne” to NBC’s forthcoming “Mercy,” all focused on these tireless heroines struggling to keep their patients alive and well. In the depths of the recession, the harried leisure classes of “Lipstick Jungle” and “Dirty Sexy Money” and “Privileged” have been elbowed out not by doctors or lawyers or Indian chiefs, but by common nurse ladies, fighting the good fight for the common man, armed only with the stubborn, righteous insistence that doctors are, more often than not, self-serving twats. Naturally I don’t need to tell you that this us-against-them routine gets old faster than the mumbling zombie woman on the local news, struggling to emote as her city is overcome by hellfire and damnation. And I don’t need to mention that “Nurse Jackie” should, by all rights, be the dark and somewhat jaunty antidote to the self-serious foolishness of “HawthoRNe” (oh God, that name alone!) and “Mercy.”

Ultimately, there’s only one thing you need to know about the first season of “Nurse Jackie”: When the first episode begins, it’s tough to understand why Nurse Jackie would cheat on her perfectly dreamy husband, and when the last episode ends, we still don’t get it. In other words, we spend 12 episodes watching Jackie act like an asshole without ever understanding why.

OK, fine, she’s an addict. She has a problem, and she’s in denial. She still tries, sure. She wants her family to be happy. She really loves Eddie (Paul Schulze), the pharmacist. They have great sex. So do she and her husband. Both of these guys are just swell. But we knew all of this by the end of the first episode, and we never learned a single new thing since then.

And also, how plausible is it that an exhausted nurse with a serious pill problem and two little kids at home is having wild and delicious sex with not one but two men? Not only that, but a dashing young doctor in the E.R. also decides that this frankly rather haggard, depraved-looking woman is his one true love?

Just as Los Angeles pretends to be a suitable home for several million human beings, when it is, in truth, a horrible sprawling sham packed with overpriced stucco hovels on tiny tracts of land, a gigantic human mistake that demands resources pumped and trucked and shipped in from faraway places, so, too, does “Nurse Jackie” pretend to be a comedy (or a drama?) suitable for several million viewers, when it is, in truth, a disjointed, reckless sham packed with bewitching jokes, a wicked romp that ultimately goes nowhere. At the end of the season, Jackie is the same mysterious blank slate that she was at the beginning.

And when Eddie finds out that she has a husband and kids, what happens? Nothing. Eddie gets drunk and acts weird, apparently without blowing Jackie’s cover, and Jackie is left freaking out and scarfing drugs, just like she was at the beginning.

That’s not a cliffhanger. That’s a flying leap off a cliff, landing with a Wile E. Coyote thud in the dust. We watch the dust cloud rise and then, the credits roll. Without any character development, there is no story. We feel about as confused as Eddie does when he sees that Jackie is living a double life. He never really knew Jackie at all, and neither did we.

Blowing in the wind

But while I’m feeling crabby and unforgiving, it’s probably time to conquer the worst new show of the fall season, hands down: ABC’s “Cougar Town” (premieres 9:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 23), a comedy that’s at once insipid, noxious, offensive, and just plain bad – hilariously bad, in fact. This is a show so utterly devoid of comedy that it’ll make you laugh out loud.

Courteney Cox plays Jules, a desperate, jittery, outspoken, pathetic middle-aged woman with a son who’s constantly embarrassed by her. Isn’t that karmic retribution for having played the sort of hopelessly stylish, effortlessly wealthy, easily embarrassed young person on “Friends” that cringes at ever becoming pathetic and middle-aged? Just as Jules publicly humiliates her son, she also publicly humiliates Monica Gellar.

But most of all, Courtney Cox should really consider firing her agent and her manager and breaking up with every single friend who allowed her to sign on to this wretchedly, hideously awful sitcom. In fact, it boggles the mind that she’s not smart enough to notice that this show is absolutely cringe-inducing and scary.

There are so many examples of creepiness here that it’s hard to know where to start. In the first minute of the show, Jules examines her body flaws in the mirror and announces that she looks “like a farm animal.” She summarizes by proclaiming, “Crap.” And we’re off to an enlightened and oh-so-amusing start!

But let’s skip the ridiculous details and get right to Cox’s best lines:

“Look at that cute guy right there. I’d like to lick his body!”

“You know how it goes, I was 19, I started thinking with my coochie-cooch and then bam, I had a kid!”

“Man, you are hot as balls!”

Yes, she did actually say “coochie-cooch.” Jules isn’t just an embarrassment to moms or to women in general, she’s an embarrassment to humanity at large.

But the best part is when Jules announces to her younger lover, “OK, I’m going to do something that I have not done in years. I told my husband that I hated it, but I don’t hate it, I love it.” You can only assume that she’s going to pull out a bag of cookies or some other misdirection. Instead, she starts unbuttoning the guy’s pants. Get it? She’s going to give him … a blow job! Teehee!

Then — you guessed it — her son and ex-husband walk in. “There’s my boy!” Jules yelps, and her husband says, “Ohhh, you said you hated that!”

Why is comedy this bad simultaneously depressing and vaguely decadent, like smoking crack with your mentally unstable cousin?

Not that I’m suggesting you should move to “Cougar Town,” but you should at least stop by for a visit, so you can marvel at the depraved goings-on along with me. After all, there’ll be plenty of mediocre new shows on TV this fall, but it might be years before a sitcom this unnervingly awful comes along again. And if there’s one thing that’s more romantic than ant freeways and billowing clouds of smoke and overpriced desert real estate, it’s got to be deeply stupid comedies about pathetic middle-aged women, the roof rats of this golden, glowing age.

: Heather Havrilesky is Salon's TV critic and author of the rabbit blog. Her memoir, "Disaster Preparedness," published in 2010. More Heather Havrilesky

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I Like to Watch

In Showtime's "Nurse Jackie," Edie Falco transforms the heroic hospital drama into a dark dramedy.

By Heather Havrilesky

Merritt Wever, left, and Edie Falco in "Nurse Jackie."

Topics:Nurse Jackie, I Like to Watch, Californication, Weeds, Television

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?

: Heather Havrilesky is Salon's TV critic and author of the rabbit blog. Her memoir, "Disaster Preparedness," published in 2010. More Heather Havrilesky

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I Like to Watch

Soothing summer TV, coming right up! A handy guide to some televised offerings to sedate you as the mercury rises.

By Heather Havrilesky

From left, images from "Nurse Jackie," "Mad Men," "So You Think You Can Dance" and "True Blood."

Topics:Nurse Jackie, Reality TV, Mad Men, I Like to Watch, Weeds, NBC, HBO, Top Chef Masters, MTV, Hung, Entourage, Television

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.

: Heather Havrilesky is Salon's TV critic and author of the rabbit blog. Her memoir, "Disaster Preparedness," published in 2010. More Heather Havrilesky