I Like Ike

This was the week I noticed that Morris Chestnut, a new addition to Nurse Jackie this season, is not a series regular but just a "Special Guest Star." I'm trying not to freak out about this: many special guest stars get promoted to opening-credits cast. But many others receive this credit designation as an indicator that they're not going to stick around forever. I really, really hope Chestnut ends up in the former category, because this show needs him. (And not just because he is FOINE.) (But that does help.)

Chestnut plays Ike Prentiss, a military veteran who's the new ER Chief at All Saints. In recent years, as the wars in the Middle East have gone on much longer than anyone, including their architects, would have thought, the returned-military-vet has become a TV staple: just last week, SVU featured one whose PTSD got him mistakenly charged in the assault of a concertgoer. Producers of a variety of shows are doing veterans a real service by writing PTSD storylines into their shows, thus raising viewer awareness of this ongoing problem, sufferers of which have a lot of shame and confusion about what they're experiencing, such that they may be reluctant to accept help that's available to them. (See also: The Client List. It's not only about handjobs! Just mostly!)

Ike is the other kind of TV military-veteran character: the kind whose combat experience has prepared him for literally anything that civilian life can throw at him. He has no patience or respect for the kinds of inefficient procedures his colleagues dogmatically follow, preferring instead to use common-sense workarounds to get shit done. Can't get an OR by calling up and asking for one? Just take the patient there and wait until the functionary in charge decides to quit being a dick about it. Confronted with a spider in a kid's ear? Just calm down the environment and wait for the spider to find its own way out. Portraying this kind of veteran also serves the social good: unemployment rates among veterans are higher than for civilians in their cohort, so offering viewers characters whose military training gives them a clear edge over other workers could actually change opinions of potential employers.

One of the aspects of Nurse Jackie that initially made me stop watching it was the fact that the titular Jackie (Edie Falco) was, in any given storyline, basically the only employee at All Saints who wasn't completely useless. The omniscient Jackie was not only more right than doctors in diagnosing patients; she was also more right than administrators when it came to beating the (very fucked-up) health-care system on behalf of patients who needed it. But Ike may actually out-Jackie Jackie. In the latest episode, he indicates that he knows Akalitus (Anna Deavere Smith) is starting to slip, forgetting things she shouldn't, and that Jackie is covering for her -- but he's wise enough to recognize that, for now, this isn't a battle worth fighting. When it becomes clear that Akalitus has been hiding a patient from her abusive husband, and that Jackie, Thor (Stephen Wallem), and Zoey (Merritt Wever) conspired with her to sneak the patient out of the hospital to a safe house, the only thing he tells Jackie is that, next time, they should let him in on it. He wants to fuck the system too!

Jackie has had to deal with enough fuckers over the years that it's a relief to know that, with O'Hara (Eve Best) gone, she has a new doctor colleague she can count on to act right. Best of all, since this bitch Roman (Betty Gilpin) is probably going to kill someone soon, since her dereliction of duty as a doctor is only going to get more brazen now that she's fucked Coop (Peter Facinelli) and is therefore likely to be even better able to control him, we probably have a devastatingly brutal dressing-down from Ike and Jackie to look forward to. I can't wait.