Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
HBO’s new series Getting On—an adaptation of a BBC sitcom by the creators of Big Love—makes no effort to portray being old and infirm, and being surrounded by the old and infirm, as anything less than grim as fuck. Naturally, it’s a comedy.
The feces—”a feces,” according to one nurse, because “it wasn’t a gang of them, it was just one piece”—becomes the narrative device through which we learn about the hospital’s female staff and their hierarchy. Brand-new Nurse Ortley (Reno 911‘s Niecy Nash) finds the poop and just wants to clean it up. Those efforts are stymied by her immediate supervisor, Nurse Dawn Forchette (Alex Borstein of Family Guy and MADtv), who insists they identify its origins and file an incident report. Dawn’s supervisor, Dr. Jenna James (Roseanne‘s—and Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s—Laurie Metcalf), wants the poop to be preserved for a “fecal study” she’s working on. See, the unit isn’t just a dead end for patients, it’s a career dead end for its staff, and James isn’t about to get stuck (although that’s exactly what happens by episode’s end).
