A television writer whose one clear fingerprint is the premise of Nurse Jackie: an addict who is the best nurse in the building. The rest of the career is rooms on other people's shows, done capably and hard to see from the sofa.
Fi1m perspective
Edie Falco's Jackie is a brilliant emergency nurse with a pill habit and a second life, and Nurse Jackie never lets the second fact cancel the first. That premise is the one piece of Evan Dunsky's work we can point to with confidence. He created the series with Liz Brixius and Linda Wallem in 2009 and wrote its pilot, and whatever happened in the writers' room over the seven seasons and 80 episodes that followed, the idea was fixed in that first script: a half-hour comedy in which the joke and the point are the same thing.
We laughed at it, and we were not always comfortable laughing, because the writing asks you to enjoy a woman getting away with something and then to notice she has just done her job better than anyone else in the building could. That is a harder trick than it looks, and the series managed it for two seasons before it began circling. Dunsky left the writing staff after the second season. We will not claim the two facts are connected, but we noticed them.
The rest of the career is harder to see from the sofa, because it was spent on other people's programmes. He began in the mid-1980s as an assistant director on independent features and television, including Tales from the Darkside, and did not write and direct anything of his own until The Alarmist in 1997, a dark comedy adapted from Keith Reddin's play Life During Wartime. Dark comedy was the thread then and it is the thread of Nurse Jackie; what came between was procedure. From 2006 he wrote 13 episodes of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, a forensic procedural, and in 2008 he wrote a teleplay for Two and a Half Men, a programme we found a chore.
After Nurse Jackie he went to cable drama as a hired hand: story and teleplay on one first-season episode of Rectify (2013), two second-season episodes of Banshee, four of Hemlock Grove. We rated Rectify very highly and Banshee well, and in neither review did we find reason to mention him, because the virtues we named belonged to Ray McKinnon and Aden Young, and to the people staging Antony Starr's fights. That is how television works. A writer with one episode on a fine series has been present at it; he has not made it.
In 2015 he was attached as showrunner and writer to a series from Caitlin Doughty's memoir Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, which was not made, and he has worked on projects with George Saunders. Neither has reached a screen. On the evidence of the one pilot that did, we would still look at anything with his name first on it.
Biography
Evan Dunsky is an American television writer, producer and director. Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1957, he began his career in the 1980s working as an assistant director on feature films and television productions before moving into writing.
He co-created the Showtime series Nurse Jackie (2009) with Linda Wallem and Liz Brixius, writing the pilot and serving as a writer and co-executive producer across its run. Dunsky has written episodes of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (from 2006), Two and a Half Men (2008), Rectify (2013), Banshee (2014) and Hemlock Grove (2014–2015). He wrote and directed the feature film The Alarmist (1997), adapted from Keith Reddin's play Life During Wartime. Dunsky received the 2010 Humanitas Prize and is married to Lisa Zimble.
