TV Eye: A matter of trust

Nurse Jackie, played by Edie Falco, can be a caring mother and a good nurse, but is not without character flaws. Photo / Supplied

Trust Me is a good name for a rather good satire set in an ad agency (Tuesdays, TV2, 10.30pm). It could also provide a subtitle for the sometimes good Nurse Jackie, back for a second season (Tuesdays, TV3, 9.35pm) Who would you trust more: an advertising type or a nurse?

Charge nurse Jackie (Edie Falco, The Sopranos' Carmela) is supposed to be utterly trustworthy - she's a nurse and we all like nurses, don't we?

They're in the caring profession, so they must be caring. They might also be pathologically bossy, but they've got access to the drugs, so you have to be nice to them. And they are much nicer than doctors who are lofty beings, who hand out the bad news while the nice nurses mop up. Everyone knows nurses are the really smart ones.

It's hard to see why American nurses hate Nurse Jackie, but some did apparently - as a character, she was bringing the profession into disrepute.

There's the little matter of the drugs. Nurse Jackie likes her drugs. Last season she was bonking the hospital's pharmacist. She liked the drugs he dished out more than him, so he's history - in more than one way. He's been replaced in her affections by her husband, and by a drug dispensing robot which can't be so easily persuaded to hand out a nice line of Percocet in exchange for a quickie.

Pharmacy man is about to go psycho. He's taken an overdose but he knew how much not to take. That's one way of getting Jackie's attention.

When that doesn't work, he takes to hanging around the bar Jackie's hapless hubbie runs. They're about to become drinking buddies. This can only end badly. Meanwhile - because this is an American sitcom that is supposed to be edgy but which means that the edges have to have the corners smoothed, or sugar-coated - one of the two cute daughters develops an anxiety disorder which involves washing shells she finds on the beach and not eating chips served by people who don't wear gloves and worrying that the house will burn down, all of which, considering her mother, seems pretty normal to me.

This allows Jackie those nice caring mom moments to go alongside those nice caring nurse moments - we're never allowed to forget that, whatever other rotten things she does, she's a nurse and therefore, a good person. Oh, and also a druggie. Wouldn't she just slip the kid a few downers? But you couldn't have a series based on a nurse who was a really bad person. Imagine the outcry.

People who work in ad agencies, on the other hand, are allowed to be truly annoying and self indulgent - that's another stereotype. Trust Me, the title, is a joke. The first episode (the series was sacked by its agency, the people who funded it, after one series) is based on an extended joke about an advertising campaign for a mobile phone company. How about Spar-Text-Icus? That's a laboured gag within a gag. The creative types who come up with it are two young go-getters who fall out after one of them is promoted. One is more of an utter bastard than the other. He is also, of course, the more talented of the pair. Guess which one got promoted?

Trust Me is a small but nicely written story about male friendship, and it manages it without the sugar coating.