Actors often want the challenge of "playing against type." That is, playing a role you wouldn't expect, based on the roles, or real-life personality, that they were known for. We get a two-fer with this show.
Michael Learned is an actress most associated with a show called "The Waltons," a gentle drama about a very large family that lived in a sprawling house in a very rural place during The Great Depression. Ms. Learned was the Matriarch of the Walton family.
Here, she's Mary Benjamin, supportive wife to her doctor husband, doting mom to her only child Chip, and a former nurse.
Robert Reed was an actor most associated with a series of contemporary programs, from the 1960s through the 1980s, of differing genres (sitcom, variety, drama) with the word "Brady" in the title. Mr. Reed was the patriarch of the Brady family.
Here, he's Adam Rose, one of the top MDs on staff at Grant Memorial Hospital in New York.
In each of these cases, these two actors' previous roles were warm, charming, considerate and kind, as were the personas of the actors playing those roles, themselves. And that's a 180 to who the two lead characters of "Nurse" were all about.
This show is also notable because it began as a TV movie with a script written by Sue Grafton. If that name sounds an alarm, it's because Ms. Grafton eventually became known as a novelist who wrote detective stories with a female lead character named Kinsey Millhone... the famed "Alphabet Series" of novels. ("A is for Alibi," "B is for Burglar," etc.) This was one of Grafton's final TV movies before her career as a novelist finally took off.
The plot of the pilot was that while on vacation, Mary's husband dropped dead playing tennis with their son (that has to be worthy of some therapy, for Chip), and mom was also right nearby, to attempt some chest compressions and perform mouth to mouth one last time. The son was about to head off to college so, that's an instant empty nest for Mary, in her hollow suburban home.
Mary does the only thing she can do: something. She decides to apply for a job at the old digs and gets the high profile assignment of head nurse in Dr. Rose's ward.
Hubby kept an apartment close to the hospital, so Mary trades her home in the suburbs for a walk up flat with all the haunting memories of her late spouse's life in the city. But at least she doesn't have to take the subway to work.
And then there's Dr. Rose. This guy is a perfectionist, a constant critic, an impatient jerk who has to say something nasty about anything he sees that isn't to his liking. This rubs Mary just the wrong way, who, as you can understand, is a bit out of sorts from some personal issues going on in her life. That turns Mary into a tiger.
Let's clarify a point. Sue Grafton wrote the original pilot, so she is listed with a "Created By" credit for the series, however she never wrote another episode after that TV movie, so the melodramatic elements of scripts involving suicide, drugs and other sensational plots were not her responsibility.
New York plays a part because the demands of the city, the needs of the patients, the level of competence and the importance of everyone's role in the action were on display, with personality conflicts sometimes in the way. Everyone needs to stay professional and do their jobs, even as they find some other person is screwing everything up.
Also the elements of the high cost of living (the rent was too damn high, even in 1981!) and an episode where the nurses go on strike made statements about how health care professionals were getting treated by the system, throughout history.
Seeing Learned and Reed doing these roles would be interesting for fans of their better known work, but I don't know that audiences wanted to embrace these characters the way they did when these two actors appeared on "The Waltons" and "The Brady Bunch," respectively.
If there is any single takeaway about "Nurse" it's that New York City can change you!
