Nurse Jackie: Pilot

For much of the past decade, Edie Falco wiled away her TV hours playing America's favorite mob wife on HBO's The Sopranos. As good as she was in that role, Carmela was never going to show Falco's full range as an actress. That's one of many reasons why her new show, Showtime's Nurse Jackie, has promise. But that's just it, it has promise. I can't say it completely delivered right out of the gate.

Just to get it out of the way, Nurse Jackie doesn't suffer nearly as much as one would think from its inevitable comparison to House. Yes, Falco plays a cynical medical professional with a pain-related drug habit, but that's all Jackie Foreman has in common with Dr. Gregory House. Her defining characteristic isn't her potential to be mean or her functional addiction, it's her overt desire to help people. Throughout this premiere episode, Jackie is wracked with frustration and guilt over the death of a bike messenger who died early in her shift, thanks in no small part to the ineptness of the attending doctor played by the tragically rare Peter Facinelli. Jackie works in a run-down hospital and suffers through a bad back so she can heal her patients. It's as simple as that.

In fact, that's the only thing about Jackie that is simple. She's a classic case of one whose moral certainty frequently outweighs her ethical concerns, like when she forges the bike messenger's signature on an organ donor card or steals money from a violent foreign official whose diplomatic immunity saves him from prosecution for cutting up a prostitute. Add to that her complicated affair with a pharmacist who keeps her floating on Vicodin and Oxycontin, and you have yourself a proper modern drama.

Nurse Jackie has its stumbling points, though. Jackie herself is a well-rounded character, but she's surrounded by supporting players who are a bit too broad. From a fellow nurse who fills this show's "slutty gay character" quota to the oblivious nursing student who seems to exist solely to hammer home just how jaded everyone else is, Nurse Jackie desperately needs to give the rest of the cast some depth. This makes the hammy comedy especially tin-eared.

Best Moment: Jackie's lunch with her doctor friend. It revealed a lot about the overall tone of the show with some good dialog and really put a fine point on the exhaustion that characterizes every frame.

Note: Nurse Jackie doesn't seem to fall into the laugh/shock system. Rather, it's a slow burn with a dusting of comedy to lighten the otherwise oppressive mood. Rather than create another arbitrary category to rate, I'll just say that I consider the lack of strong laughs or shocks one of the show's strengths because they're replaced by nuance.

Episode Rating: 3.8/5- The script can be a little sophomoric at times and nobody else in the cast holds a candle to Edie Falco performance-wise. While I believe she could carry the show on her own, I really don't think Nurse Jackie would benefit from such an arrangement. It was good for a pilot, but the rest of the series is going to have to tighten a lot of things up before the show really finds its tone.