By Craig Ellenport
Thanks to Showtime’s awesome PR folks, my wife and I have
gotten a jump on Season 4 of “Nurse Jackie” – easily one of the best shows on
TV. The season doesn’t officially launch until this Sunday, April 8, but we
were already on Episode 2 the other night when we noticed a familiar face -- in
a decided unfamiliar place…
BREAKING NEWS: Carmelo Anthony is in drug rehab!
Okay, well it was a fictional character being portrayed by
Carmelo Anthony. That’s right, the New York Knicks star shows up at the drug
rehab facility that Jackie – Edie Falco of “Sopranos” fame, for the
uninitiated – checks herself into at the start of this season.
So next Sunday, April 15, is a big day for ‘Melo. He and the
Knicks are in Miami that afternoon to play LeBron and the Heat. And that night
he makes his Jackie appearance on Showtime.
It’s not Anthony’s first TV gig – he made the most of the
NBA lockout last fall when he filmed both the “Nurse Jackie” appearance and a
cameo on “Law & Order: SVU.”
The difference is that on “SVU” he had a simple cameo
playing himself – a role he literally was born to play. The “Nurse Jackie” role
is a slightly bigger challenge – not only because he must play a drug addict. While
his character is a professional athlete… he’s a baseball player.
Perhaps the writers were afraid to make him a basketball
player because, at the time they wrote the episode, they didn’t know if there
would be an NBA season when the show aired.
FYI, it’s shaping up to be a star-filled season of “Nurse
Jackie,” and I’ve only seen the first five episodes. In Sunday’s season
premiere, Billy Joe of Green Day spends some quality time with Jackie. Anthony
is in Episode 2; in Episode 5, Rosie Perez makes an appearance.
And if you haven’t seen “Nurse Jackie,” it’s not too late to
get into it. The regular cast so good that they really don’t need big-name
guests to spice it up, is terrific, so ‘Melo and company are just a bonus for
one of the more underrated, underappreciated show on TV.
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