Falco Makes a Naughty, Irresistible Nurse Jackie

She's addicted to painkillers, cheats on her husband with a pharmacist, and punishes a diplomat who stabbed a hooker by flushing his ear down the toilet. In Showtime's Nurse Jackie, debuting tonight, Edie Falco is no Carmela Soprano, but a sarcastic, no-nonsense nurse who's better, critics say, than the show she's in.

• “Falco is piercingly good, enough to make you wish the writing was as sharp as her performance,” writes Caryn James for the Daily Beast.

• "As a nurse, she seems to have learned in equal parts from Gray’s Anatomy and the Old Testament, writes Mark Perigard in the Boston Herald: “This is my prescription: Take one Nurse Jackie before bedtime. It’ll cure common television.”
• Falco escapes her Sopranos character “partly because she brings the same skills to the new role, making Jackie seem just as real as Carmela did,” observes Nancy Franklin in the New Yorker.
• The show’s “not as seditious as it seeks to be, but when it stops trying too hard, it’s an enjoyable drama, and that’s not so bad,” writes Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times.

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