“Nurse Jackie” (Showtime, 9 p.m.) is one of those shows that tended to be taken for granted, underrated, but will be sorely missed once the final episode of the seventh and last season shows tonight.
It’s been blessed with not only Edie Falco, who has done some of her strongest work in the show (this after “The Soprano”), but also a strong supporting cast. Though it began with very different show runners, its last few seasons have been strong thanks to Clyde Phillips, who came over to the show once “Dexter” ended on the same network.
That move was a tricky one, he told me earlier this year.
“It was definitely a learning curve, and I made some mistakes along the way,” Phillips said. “And made some really good decisions along the way. “One of the things that I discovered in coming over from ‘Dexter,,” he said, “is that the characters were not all that dissimilar. They had deep, dark secrets that they kept from the people who were closest to them. And they did things that arguably not arguably, but inarguably were terrible to the people who were closest to them, and yet we still love them.”
Then there was the cast.
“With ‘Dexter’ we were able to get inside him through voiceover,” Phillips said. “And on ‘Nurse Jackie,’ we got to get inside the character and love the character just because of this face,” he added, pointing to Falco.
But what mistakes did he think he made, I asked him.
“I got a little too ambitious a little too fast,” he said. “If you remember the first episode with the bus crash.”
It got so involved, he said, “I think we still might be shooting it.”
But that’s what happens when a new person is hired.
“I wanted to come in big, hard, and fast and might have gone a little too hard and fast on it.,” he said “And the rest, you know, we just weren’t ready for it. So then once I understood everybody’s rhythms, I think we had a beautiful last couple of years.”
The other learning curve was about all the drugs and addiction that is at the heart of the drama.
“Coming from a world in which there is not addiction in my family, I have learned to have great compassion for somebody who is an addict. And I have, I think, a greater understanding and patience and also a greater sense of adventure in storytelling” as a result, Phillips said.
“We started out this season knowing what our ending was going to be and then completely changed it, because the show spoke to us. And we much as we did last season as well, because these characters all have their own voices.
“This is such an extraordinary cast that we hear their voices and we write in their voices. They are sitting with us as we write these scripts and as we come up with these stories. And I’ve never — maybe with the possible exception of Michael Hall — I’ve never had that experience before. And so I just think as a storyteller, I was pretty good at what I did when I joined the show, and I think I’m a lot better now that we’re ending the show.”
And how will it end?
Well, they’re not going to burn the hospital down, he said.
It’s not that “Nurse Jackie” ran out of stories to tell.
“I think that had we been renewed for another year, that we could have delivered a terrific year,” Phillips said.
But when they got the phone call, he added, “it made sense in a way. We had told the up and back story of addiction and of trust and of love and of consequence and of the shrapnel that a drug addict has inflicted upon her colleagues and her family and her friends in about as many ways as we possibly could. And I think that we’re ending in a graceful and authentic way this year.”
Does he a believer in happy endings?
“I’m not,” he said. “I’m a believer in authentic endings. And I think that the end of this season is as authentic as it can possibly be and will be really satisfying to the viewers.”
Phillips has a happy ending career wise though. His adaptation of “Broke,” based on the Danish series “Bankerot,” has just been given a straight-to-series order by AMC, with an expected premiere next year.