Rosanne Cash Can’t Resist: “Nurse Jackie”

Unless you’ve spent the last 50 years cryogenically frozen in deep space, you may have heard of Rosanne Cash‘s father, Johnny Cash. When Rosanne locked in on becoming a successful country singer/songwriter, she had a formidable set of footsteps to follow. But she isn’t one to duck a challenge. Twenty of her singles cracked the top 20 in the country charts from 1979 to 1990, with 11 reaching the number-one spot. Her new album, The List (out next week on EMI/Manhattan), is a terrific reworking of country classics, handpicked from a list of indispensable songs her dad made for her 36 years ago. Having Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Jeff Tweedy and Rufus Wainwright appear as guest artists on the record is a nice fit. Rosanne will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week long. Read our Q&A with her.

Cash: I don’t like television that much. I usually stumble on a show I like and stick with it until it’s over, then I wait to stumble on the next one. I’ve never seen a reality show, where people marry each other for money or girls with big butts go shopping or people have plastic surgery with their friends, but I hear that these are very popular. I went from a mild obsession with Friends in the late ’90s (I was pregnant, and there was nothing better than sitting down at 7 p.m. with a bar-b-qued chicken and a bowl of pickles in front of the ultimate junk TV show) to The Sopranos (I stuck with Tony, et al, for many years and loved the show deeply). It was the only thing I watched. Then The Sopranos ended in a whiteout, and I was bereft. But suddenly, there was In Treatment. I was one of those women of a certain age who got all jelly-kneed over Gabriel Byrne and who had very definite opinions about why his patients were so fucked up and what was to be done with them. When In Treatment was over, I found House. I was so excited. I came upon it long after it had become a big hit, but I didn’t care. I dvr’d it and watched season after season. Hugh Laurie could never get cranky enough for me. Misanthropy was never so romantic. That pretty much brings my television viewing up to date for the last decade and a half, until this summer when I discovered Nurse Jackie. The whole premise of the show teems with fantastic potential disasters. Nurse Jackie, played by the superb Edie Falco, is a hyper-functional emergency-room nurse who happens to be an oxycontin addict (along with occasional interesting junkie forays into morphine and zanax). She is also having a sordid affair with the hospital pharmacist, who supplies her with drugs after every tryst in the supply closet. She is married to a super-straight bartender husband who is way too perfect emotionally, and they have two cute little girls. Her best friend is a Brit doctor who wears designer clothes and high heels in the E.R. and seems to have nothing but contempt for all of humanity, except for her best friend Jackie. The show is filled out by the greatest student nurse ever, Zoey, who is a babe in crazyland and who recently put a movie critic in a coma (way to go!), and a hospital administrator who eats nails for breakfast. I love this show. Nurse Jackie‘s whole house of cards is set up to fall in the most spectacular way; a catastrophe of epic proportions looms on the personal, career, social and romantic fronts, but season one has been all set-up and no catastrophe. I’m waiting. Nurse Jackie has something from every show I’ve loved in the last decade: a great friendship, violence (it’s a busy E.R.), psychological train wrecks, misanthropy and medical mysteries. If Gabriel Byrne would just do a guest spot, I’d die happy.