Dr. Jenna James

Dr. Jenna James runs the geriatric extended care unit at Mount Palms Memorial like it's a stepping stone to somewhere better, which she believes it still could be. She's fixated on a research project about stool samples that might finally get her noticed, and she moves through the ward's daily indignities with brisk, oblivious self-importance, barely registering the patients as people.

Laurie Metcalf plays ambition curdled by a dead-end job with such precise discomfort that Jenna becomes hilarious without ever softening into likable. The writing never lets her land a win, and Metcalf's flop-sweat earnestness—chasing a bowel-study paper like it's a Nobel Prize—makes institutional futility feel painfully, specifically funny.