Nurse Jackie, "Twitter": Are you there, God? It's me, Zoey

I said last week that I'm both too busy and too underwhelmed with "Nurse Jackie" season two to review every episode, but as tonight's was the best of the 8 I've seen, I wanted to at least mention how good both Merritt Wever was (Zoey and "God" make a great comedy team) and how much I love the idea of Coop getting his own Twitter account, not only because Peter Facinelli himself has an insane Twitter following, but because Tweeting his innermost thoughts seems exactly like the sort of thing Coop would think the world would want.

What did everybody else think?

'Nurse Jackie' & 'United States of Tara' reviews: andreikirilenkotattoo on TV

In today's column, I review the new seasons of "Nurse Jackie" and "United States of Tara." As you can tell by reading it, I was more of a fan of "Tara" season two than "Jackie," and given what a hellacious spring this is for me as a guy who writes about TV, my plan for now is to give "Tara" the episode-by-episode treatment while either skipping over "Jackie" altogether or touching on it from time to time if I have thoughts on a specific episode.

So, back tonight at 11 with a separate "Tara" premiere review, and if you want to talk about the "Jackie" premiere, feel free to do it here.

Nurse Jackie: Season one post-mortem with Liz Brixius and Linda Wallem

When I was at press tour earlier this month, I spent a few minutes talking to "Nurse Jackie" showrunners Liz Brixius (she's the tall one on the left) and Linda Wallem (on the right) about some unanswered questions from the first season (click here for my review of the season finale) and where they see the show going next year. Our conversation coming right up...

Something that's come up with a lot of my readers is about the logistics and the reasons behind Jackie keeping her family a secret from the folks at the hospital. How does she do this? She's been there forever and the kids are not that old. Presumably, she was pregnant at some point.

Brixius: ER nurses, the ones that Linda and I spoke with, you'll do maybe 3 years at St. Luke's, then go up to Harlem and do a thing, then go down to Bellevue. All Saints isn't going to have her entire history.

Wallem: I think people were thrown off by the (Judith Ivey) episode, they thought they had worked together for years. They had, but not necessarily at that hospital. And from our own experience of not being sober, what you do is you compartmentalize with your lies. It fuels the drama. You like to keep things separate. Season two, it's going to be a little harder for her to do that.

Brixius: It's not particularly original for us to say it, but if you build a better mousetrap, you get a smarter mouse. It's fun to watch Jackie navigate her own contraption.

How much, in your minds, does Jackie actually care about Eddie, and how much is she just using him to get the pills?

Brixius: She loves him. That's the complicated part of it all. People will say, 'Well, why would she (do that) with this amazing husband at home?' But you know what happens? You go to work in an ER, and it's like a tour of duty. You're watching people die, every single day, watching people come in with their guts spilled out. All you want to do is save their lives, and you can't go home and tell your husband who runs the bar that this is what your day was, and expect him to understand. But the guy next door in the pharmacy, he was there when you were trying to keep someone out of pain.

Wallem: But also part of being an addict is, whether it's a pill or a drink or a person, more is better. We both have that experience in our sordid past in the '80s.

Well, also the episode where we found out they were high school sweethearts, that clicked something for me: Okay, he's perfect, but it's been forever.

Wallem: Right, and we were trying to have fun also, that Eddie connects with her in an intellectual way.

Brixius: They have conversations about quantum physics.

Wallem: So it's kind of fun that - again, more is better.

First year of a show, there's a learning curve. Are there certain things that, looking back, you thought, 'This really worked, maybe this didn't, maybe more of this, less of that'?

Brixius: No. I think that the show taught us what it was as we were doing it. We had a few pre-conceived notions, like, for example, Zoey was going to be more of a traditional protege, O'Hara was going to be an icy blonde American clinician. When these actors came in, they nailed it in ways that we hadn't imagined, and then the way they inhabited the characters informed what Linda and I saw going forward. So, we don't ever go very far down the road in terms of something we think isn't going to work. We're just following our guts, and that tends to work out nicely.

Wallem: And we were blessed with Showtime's guidance on this. (Network president Robert) Greenblatt is amazing, we get great notes from him.

Brixius: He's guardrails, so we don't go off the road. He'll let us go a while, but he'll put up guardrails if he needs to. Every once in a while he'll go, 'My experience says that won't work, take it another direction.'

The one character who has come under a microscope is Akalitus. It seems like a lot of her stuff is tonally quite different from everything that's happening on the show. Is that something you've noticed? And are you comfortable with that?

Wallem: We are, and it's fun to us because Anna Deavere is an actress who usually plays characters that are so serious. I think you're going to find out more about her next season. Yeah, there were times we tended to get a little wacky with her, but gosh, we had a blast with her.

Brixius: And we like the wackiness, because what we're trying to do in a half an hour is convey the total absurdity of what an emergency room is like. You can't have Jackie play absurd, because Edie's not an absurd actress, ever. O'Hara has her own levels of absurdity, Zoey has her kind, but everything they deal with was very dire. So if you need comic relief, a really fun and surprising place to get it from would not necessarily be the hospital administrator, because that's a little on the Hot Lips (from "M*A*S*H") side, but if Anna Deavere Smith is playing that, it goes against any expectation you've ever had of her, and she's genius. So it's fun.

The actress you got to play the older daughter, Grace, is so good.

Wallem: Isn't she amazing? Ruby. She amazes us. To be able to grasp what's going on, that young. We are thrilled with her.

And she has me very worried, though. I watch her watching her mom sing "Up On the Roof" and I think, "Uh-oh."

Wallem: I know. And next season, we're dealing more with the anxiety. What do you do with a kid who has this anxiety disorder? We've gotten a lot of feedback from parents whose kids (have it), and they've been very thankful. We were bent on not doing your typical cute, well-scrubbed kids. We're really pleased with how they came out.

Thematically, what would you say the story of this season was, and what territory do you want to explore next year?

Brixius: Thematically, this let us introduce to you the chaos of an ER through this one woman's life. That was it. Opening up what that world is. Next year is...

Wallem: ...more of her life. It's what she has to do...

Brixius: ...to deal with the consequences of season one.

'Nurse Jackie' season finale review - andreikirilenkotattoo on TV

In today's column, I look back over the first season of "Nurse Jackie," which ends tonight starting at 10:30(*). I'm on vacation, but in lieu of a finale blog post, I have the transcript of my conversation with showrunners Linda Wallem and Liz Brixius set to go live right after the finale.

(*) And yes, I'm aware the finale has already aired On Demand, but we're following the air schedule, so no commenting on the episode until tonight at 11, after the interview post goes up.

Nurse Jackie, "Pill-O-Matix": The itsy-bitsy-spider

Spoilers for tonight's penultimate episode of "Nurse Jackie" season one coming up just as s soon as I figure out why cats are so underused in the film industry...

"Oh, my darling, what a wildly entertaining mess you've made." -O'Hara

While "Nurse Jackie" has been predictably uneven in its first season, "Pill-O-Matix" was probably the strongest episode since Judith Ivey turned up for "Tiny Bubbles," yet it was its polar opposite. Where "Tiny Bubbles" worked so well by ditching most of the show's comedy trappings and going for pathos, "Pill-O-Matix" was maybe the most overtly comedic - or, at least, the most successfully comedic - episode to date.

Yes, Jackie's life is a mess, but as O'Hara notes between laughter(*), it's an entertaining mess. So many laugh-out-loud moments in this one, whether it was a lovestruck Coop thinking he was complimenting Melissa by telling her "I've dated, like, a hundred of you, I swear," or Eddie heckling the Pill-O-Matix rep, or Mo-Mo and Thor dealing with Spider-Ear-Man, or Zoey (wonderful, reliably hilarious Zoey) harassing the movie critic and then randomly noticing that Thor is gay in the middle of a pep talk. Heck, even Mrs. Akalitus was well-used in this one, as she made a brief love connection with the movie critic over the thankless job of holding the world to a higher standard.

(*) As O'Hara, Eve Best has one of the more infectious laughs I've ever heard. It's really lovely, isn't it?

Yet there were still dark moments in this one. Eddie is despondent over losing his job, and gutted when he follows Jackie home to the parallel universe where she's a contented wife and mom. Zoey puts Victor Garber into a coma, and it doesn't appear to be Jackie's fault.(**) Grace is still miserable, and Jackie herself is barely holding on with all the crises she has to deal with.

(**) I'm open to counter-arguments on that one, though. I initially assumed that Jackie was blaming Zoey for a mistake Jackie herself made in a Vicodin haze, but I rewound their previous interaction a few times, and it doesn't appear that Jackie gave her the wrong info. And if she had, wouldn't Zoey have immediately whipped out her handy-dandy notebook?

But where some earlier episodes felt uneven in the way they shifted from drama to comedy and vice versa, everything felt of a piece in "Pill-O-Matix," and everything felt like it was building well off what we had seen before.

Despite the use of an alt-rock cover of the theme from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" over the final scene, "Nurse Jackie" isn't quite a 21st century version of "MTM." Mary Richards had problems in her personal life, but not remotely to this degree. But episodes like this one, and "Tiny Bubbles," make me feel confident that, creatively, this show is going to make it, after all.

Now, I'm going to be on vacation early next week. It's my hope that I can get my finale review done in time, along with a transcript of my press tour interview with showrunners Linda Wallem and Liz Brixius, but I can't promise, with as many things as I have on my plate. If it doesn't work out, I'll schedule an open post to go up a week from tonight, and then try to come back with my own thoughts on Wednesday or Thursday.

And for the final time this season, let me remind you that we're following the air schedule, not the On Demand schedule, so I don't want any talk about the finale in here. Any comments that are even borderline will be deleted.

What did everybody else think?

Nurse Jackie, "Ring Finger": Stop. Hammer time.

Quick spoilers for tonight's "Nurse Jackie" coming up just as soon as I figure out if this is Sunday...

"Super obese is morbidly obese!"(*) -Zoey

(*) No, that line doesn't really sum up the themes of this episode, but it was so freaking funny that I wanted to highlight it up top.

Jackie's downward spiral goes ever deeper in this one, as she has to literally break her ring finger to come up with a plausible excuse for cutting off the ring, and as she indulges Coop's weird attraction to her to cover for the organ donor mess from last week. And Zoey finds out about her and Eddie, which is a terrible for a woman like Jackie, who's so paranoid about anyone knowing anything about her that she will, in fact, smash her finger with a hammer to keep her lives separate.

I'm still recuperating from press tour, so I'm not going to analyze this one any deeper. But I just wanted to offer up a couple of tidbits from my conversation with showrunners Linda Wallem and Liz Brixius, which I'll be running in full after the finale:

• Wallem and Brixius are both recovering addicts, and they said the kind of fanatical compartmentalization that Jackie practices isn't uncommon among addicts.

• In terms of the logistics of Jackie hiding her two pregnancies from her co-workers, they said that "Tiny Bubbles" (the episode with Judith Ivey) gave the false impression that Jackie has been working at All Saints since Paula was there. Instead, the idea is supposed to be that Jackie has bounced around among many different hospitals in New York, including prior stints at All Saints, but that she's only been back there for a few years.

Anyway, I hope to be back in the swing of things for the season's final two episodes. In the meantime, what did everybody else think?

Nurse Jackie, "Nosebleed": The point of no return?

Quick thoughts on tonight's "Nurse Jackie" coming up just as soon as I send you some lice shampoo...

"Fun? This is not fun. This is f--king hard." -Jackie

We're now in the home stretch of season one, with only three episodes to go after this one, so it's time for Jackie to start experiencing the consequences of her reckless behavior. The most obvious physical one is the bloody nose she's gotten from snorting all that Vicodin. But beyond that, she has Grace (who's savvy enough to know that something bad is happening with her mom at work that Jackie brings home with her) acting out, and the ever-diligent Zoey's notebook showing that Jackie may have been at fault for Mr. Everett losing his foot, not to mention however Coop will react when he finds out that Jackie lied about him confirming time of death for the bogus organ donor.

Simply put, Jackie is out of control, and there's only so long she can get away with that before someone in her work or home lives recognizes all the lies, all the juggling, all the rules being broken. When Eddie explains the concept of parallel universes to her, it's funny to think of Jackie trying to live in two parallel worlds at once. But she's living one single life, and it's a mess, and things are likely going to get much worse for her and the people in that life.

But as good as the Jackie material is (Edie Falco being brilliant, natch), "Nurse Jackie" as a whole still has some tonal problems, particularly when it tries to be funny. Now, Merritt Wever is hilarious as Zoey, and Falco and Peter Facinelli and Haaz Sleiman have their moments of deadpan comedy wonderfulness, but so many other comic scenes are way, way too broad, whether it's the stereotypically snooty rich lady with the lice kids, or Mrs. Akalitus with the baby (and then with the baby's idiot parents).

As you're reading this, I'm at a combined CBS/Showtime/CW non-party party for press tour, and I hope to talk to Linda Wallem and Liz Brixius about the show. If nothing else, I want to get a sense of what they feel the strengths and weaknesses of this first season have been -- which, if they roughly overlap with my own, would make me feel more confident about season two.

What did everybody else think?

Nurse Jackie, "Pupil": Don't kid a kidder

Hi. As mentioned earlier, I don't have time to properly review tonight's "Nurse Jackie" because I'm busy preparing for tomorrow's start of press tour, but I do have a few quick thoughts on this one: 1)Ruby Jerins, who plays Jackie's older daughter Grace, is a terrific young actress. I suspect that if she and/or her parents want her to continue acting as she gets older, we're going to see a lot of her. 2)Always nice to see Andrea Martin working, and amusing to see Jill Flint (who's currently playing a doc on "Royal Pains") and Alexie Gilmore (who played an ER doc on Fox's short-lived "New Amsterdam") as her bickering, non-medically-trained daughters. 3)Merritt Wever continues to be hysterical ("I have, like, two more questions"), and it seems like they're setting up Zoey to figure out Jackie's pill problem through her note-taking.

Nurse Jackie, "Steak Knife": Talking to God

Quick spoilers for tonight's "Nurse Jackie" coming up just as soon as I give a baby some paperclips to play with...

"Too bad it's not made of Vicodin." -Eddie

If last week's wonderful episode felt like a breakthrough for this uneven series, then "Steak Knife" was a bit of a step back. There were still a number of extremely strong things in it -- notably Jackie's increasing doom spiral, reflected in her bad reaction to her one-year anniversary with Eddie, and in her struggling to be the shoulder for Dr. O'Hara to lean on rather than vice versa -- but there were also other parts that suggest a show that's still finding itself.

Specifically, I could do without the show hammering us over the head with the parallels between the patients and their caregivers (here with Jackie and the woman who can't let herself be with nice guys). If I want that, I'll watch "Grey's Anatomy" or "House," thank you very much. One of the advantages of cable dramas, in theory, is that because they're catering to a more select audience, they don't need to dumb things down as much as a broad-tent show like "Grey's." The "Jackie" writers would do well to keep that in mind and try for a little more subtlety on subplots like this.

Along similar lines, Mrs. Akalitus wandering around the hospital with an abandoned baby? Really? Last week's episode briefly turned her into someone resembling a human being, rather than the cartoonish authority figure she'd been previously. But this was right back to her being a buffoon.

But, geez, Edie Falco is so terrific, as was Paul Schulze in the scene where Eddie finally acknowledges that Jackie cares more about the pills than about him. I will forgive a lot for a great performance or three -- and I can never leave out praise of Merritt Wever, who may be the most endearingly funny character on my TV set at the moment -- so I'm hanging in with "Nurse Jackie" even as the growing pains resume.

What did everybody else think?

Nurse Jackie, "Tiny Bubbles": Toast up. Toasting.

I'm on vacation at the time you're reading this, but tonight's "Nurse Jackie" was so outstanding -- and was a big reason why I gave the show such a positive review at the start in spite of some unevenness in the other early episodes -- that I wanted to give it a quick write-up before I left. (In an ideal world, I'd write more, but I gots to go.) Spoilers coming up just as soon as I get you to walk with me...

"F--k you, and here's to me." -Paula

The comedy and drama sides of "Nurse Jackie" haven't yet learned how to co-exist, and an episode like "Tiny Bubbles" suggests that until they do, the writers should err on the side of drama. Because where some previous episodes felt interesting but slight, "Tiny Bubbles" felt solid and powerful throughout. Even the relatively lighter moments -- like the Coop Has Two Mommies subplot -- had more weight, and felt more satisfying.

Much of the credit for all of this goes to Tony-winning Judith Ivey, who was wonderful as Paula, turning a character who could very easily have been a cliche into a very real person whose life and death had an obvious impact on the rest of the cast. Hell, even Mrs. Akalitis seemed like a human being for most of this one.

Great work, also, by Blythe Danner and Swoosie Kurtz as Coop's aforementioned two mommies, who went a long way towards deepening a character who'd previously been there just as comic relief.

But the regular cast was great, too. I loved Eddie setting Zoey straight on the subject of how unusual this situation is, and O'Hara being mildly serious for once as she offered to help Jackie. And, of course, Edie Falco was outstanding throughout, especially during the moment where Jackie learned she isn't the first nurse to get pain pills from Eddie, and in the final sequence (wonderfully scored to Patty Griffin's "It Don't Come Easy") where Jackie went to pack up Paula's apartment and found that Paula beat her to the punch.

I have a DVD with episodes seven through twelve, and if I do anything vaguely work-related over this vacation, I suspect it'll involve watching those episodes to see if "Tiny Bubbles" was an aberration or the episode where the pieces all started clicking into place.

Keeping in mind that we are not going to discuss the seventh episode, which went up On Demand today, what did everybody else think?

Nurse Jackie, "Daffodil": When Coop met Eddie

Because I had jury duty today, I don't have time to write up tonight's fifth episode of "Nurse Jackie," but feel free to discuss it on your own. (And, as always, keep in mind that we're not going to talk about the next episode, which went up On Demand today.)

Nurse Jackie, "School Nurse": Black and white problem

Spoilers for the fourth episode of "Nurse Jackie" coming up just as soon as I color-correct a drawing...

"School Nurse," the first of back-to-back episodes directed by Edie Falco's old "Sopranos" co-star Steve Buscemi, has children on its mind. Jackie gets into it with the teachers at her daughter's school when they suggest Grace is suffering from an anxiety disorder. Dr. O'Hara reveals, not surprisingly, a complete lack of any maternal side, while Mo Mo shows his first real signs of depth when he bonds with a little kid who reminds him of the twin brother he lost at age 1. And even Zoey, who's a grown woman, spends a large chunk of the episode acting like a kid and pouting over missing all the interesting cases, only to get some perspective after experiencing her first patient death.

I liked the parallel at the end of the episode of Zoey and Jackie both trying to improve a picture by coloring it in. But where Zoey understands that she's lost this patient, even as she performs the kind post-mortem gesture of giving her back her eyebrows, Jackie's insistence on adding color to Grace's gray drawing(*) shows that she's in denial about the problem.

(*) True story: Day after my wife and I watch this episode, I come home from work and my wife excitedly shows me a landscape drawing that our daughter did in kindergarten that day. "Look at all the colors!" my wife told me, beaming. Cable drama: always an easy way to remind yourself of all the ways your life is better than theirs.

But then, Jackie's in denial about a lot of things, from the Vicodin use to the balancing act she has going with Eddie and her husband, at one point simultaneously fielding calls from both men and telling them, "Can't talk! Love ya!" It's treated as a joke here, but Jackie's willingness to use the word "love" in connection to Eddie brings us back to last week's discussion about how much of that relationship is about the pills and how much is about genuine feelings she has for the guy. Maybe it's just because Falco and Paul Schulze have such obvious chemistry together (as you'd hope they would after knowing each other since college), but I find it hard to watch their scenes together and believe that it's just about the pills. Maybe it's somewhat, perhaps even mostly, about the pills, but Jackie does have affection, if not love, for her drug connect.

Keeping in mind once again that we're sticking with the air schedule, and therefore not going to talk about the content of the fifth episode, which went up On Demand today, what did everybody else think?

Nurse Jackie, "Chicken Soup": Eli's going

Spoilers for tonight's "Nurse Jackie" coming up just as soon as I marry my cat...

Eli Wallach is nearly 94 years old. Even though his acting career didn't really take off until he was in his 40s, he's worked with the likes of Clint Eastwood, Peter O'Toole, Audrey Hepburn and Steve McQueen. He's played Mexican banditos (check out this montage of some of his best moments as Tuco in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"), "Batman" villains (he was one of the Mr. Freezes) and a Corleone family advisor (albeit in "Godfather Part III"). He's in his 90s, still working, and either makes good things better or briefly elevates bad things (like his "Studio 60" cameo, or his appearance in "The Holiday.")

The point being, Eli Wallach represents many things that are awesome, and his presence in "Chicken Soup" -- working alongside both Edie Falco and the always-welcome Lynn Cohen -- helped elevate the episode above the usual medical show cliches about the wisdom of dying elderly patients.

There's been some discussion in the posts on the first two episodes about the tone of "Nurse Jackie" -- whether we're supposed to take this all at face value, as some kind of satire or as Jackie's perspective through the Vicodin haze. Having seen six episodes of the show, I'm not sure I have an answer yet, because I'm not sure the "Nurse Jackie" production team has quite decided what it to be. As Falco told me a while back, the original pilot script was quite a bit darker than what the show is now, and I imagine there are some growing pains, and a little creative tug-of-war with Showtime.

But it doesn't feel like the pieces are that mismatching (save maybe the stuff with Anna Deavere Smith, and even she got a few moments of humanity in this one before Cohen cursed at her in Yiddish), and I'm glad that we're getting more and more of a sense of the supporting cast with each episode.

Peter Facinelli, for instance, has turned out to be almost shockingly likable as the goofball Coop ("Captain, we are powerless against the overwhelming force of the Pyxis!"), and Merritt Wever and Eve Best are turning out to be a wonderful little comedy duo as Zoe and Dr. O'Hara.

But what I really want to discuss with "Chicken Soup" is a question I asked last week, and which this episode made me ask myself repeatedly: how much of Jackie's thing with Eddie ties in to his ability to provide her with Vicodin? We see that they click on some level, but we can also see how impatient she gets when he tries giving her a back rub instead of pill samples. Jackie's attempt to get Coop to speak out against the pill-dispensing robot -- complete with hilarious cut to her and Eddie having their routine noon quickie -- could be read as her trying to help out a friend, or her trying to maintain her drug supply, as she can't trade sex for pills with a machine. (Unless, of course, that machine is the PimpBot 5000.)

Keeping in mind, once again, that we're discussing the episodes via the air schedule (and, therefore, not going to talk about the fourth episode, which was available On Demand starting today), what did everybody else think?

Nurse Jackie, "Sweet-N-All": Waiting for the God particle

Spoilers for the second episode of "Nurse Jackie" coming up just as soon as I get ready for a modeling shoot...

"Doctors don't heal. We heal." -Jackie

Series pilots, as a rule, tend to be flashier than the series on average will be. They're designed as a selling tool, and therefore are loaded down with the biggest, most memorable elements that might convince a network executive to pick up the show, or a casual TV viewer to set a DVR season pass.

Second episodes, when they're done right (as opposed to when they just have to repeat the pilot all over again for the benefit of viewers who didn't watch the previous week), tend to go a little deeper -- to show angles to the characters we couldn't see in the pilot, to reveal the mundane reality behind some of the pilot's more shocking moments, etc.

"Sweet-N-All" is very much in that tradition. After giving us a whole lot of Jackie as vigilante nurse in the pilot, and surprising some (but not all) of the audience with the last-second reveal that Jackie is married with kids (and, therefore, that her relationship with Eddie the pharmacist is adultery), "Sweet-N-All" dials things back a bit, while offering more insight into Jackie and the people around her.

Where the comparable second episode of "Mad Men" showed us the reasons why Don Draper might be stepping out on his trophy wife, this one offers no obvious explanation for why Jackie needs to cheat on her husband Kevin -- at least, no obvious fault of Kevin's. He makes pancakes for dinner, is an enthusiastic and uncomplaining primary caretaker parent, and the sex scene in the Peyton family kitchen (on top of either Fruity Pebbles or Cap'N Crunch) suggests that the couple has a relatively active and healthy sex life (as active as any couple with two relatively small kids can have, at any rate).

But that lack of obvious character flaw on Kevin's part so far tells us more about Jackie, and allows us to ask more questions. Is she restless? Weak? She and Eddie get along well enough, as we see in the discussion of the "God particle," but would she even be sleeping with him if she didn't so badly need a painkiller supply?

Beyond Jackie, "Sweet-N-All" goes deeper into the rest of the cast(*). We discover that Coop isn't a 100% incompetent doctor -- and that this, in turn, threatens the worldview of Jackie's lunch buddy, Dr. O'Hara. (I love her description of Coop as "nothing but a big girl's blouse.") Zoey continues to be funny, but also seem human, as she understandably freaks out after Jackie gets slapped by a patient, and again after Jackie tries to pass the buck to her for the ear Jackie flushed in the pilot.

(*) Most of them, anyway. Anna Deavere Smith is again stuck with a goofy subplot, as Mrs. Akalitus accidentally takes one of Jackie's secret painkiller packets. It's also one of the few times in the episodes I've seen where I noticed them employing the obnoxious "Grey's Anatomy"-style Please Laugh Now music.

And speaking of the unflushed ear, while the second episode doesn't feature Jackie doing anything quite as extreme as that, or illegally turning a dead patient into an organ donor, we do still see her going beyond the line of duty (or simply crossing a line) a few times, as she tells off the skater kid's mom for putting his modeling career over his safety, and as she helps out the cab driver after his heart attack. What makes those moments work, where on other shows (like, again, "Hawthorne," which I'll be panning in tomorrow's column) the nurse just seems insufferably self-righteous, is the matter-of-fact nature of Edie Falco's performance in those moments. She sees the cabbie arresting and very calmly asks burnt-face Eileen to wheel herself back into the hospital to get help, then barely blinks before she offers the guy her very last painkiller packet. This isn't a big dramatic moment; this is just Jackie doing what she does -- which, more often than not, lives up to what she tells Zoey about how nurses are healers.

Some other thoughts:

• Unless they added it to the pilot after the version I saw, this is the first episode with the opening credits sequence. As with most Showtime and HBO series, it looks amazing, but I'm not at all a fan of the music that goes with it. It sounds too brassy, like an outtake from the scoring sessions for the "Boston Legal" theme, and it doesn't seem to match the visuals.

• Somebody reminded me that Dominic Fumusa, who plays Kevin, is another "Sopranos" alum, albeit far more obscure than Falco or Paul Schulze. He played Christopher's cousin, Greg Moltisanti, who introduced Chris to the Alicia Witt character (aka Greg's fiancee) in season one's "D-Girl." IMDb (which is admittedly always iffy about ages) has Fumusa as six years younger than Falco, but the age gap looks wider than that. Either way, I have to assume they cast a more boyish-looking actor as Jackie's husband for a reason.

• Not surprisingly, Mo-Mo isn't the only gay nurse at All Saints, as we're introduced to the imposing but very effeminate Thor, played by Stephen Wallem, who's related (the Showtime publicist thinks they're siblings) to "Nurse Jackie" co-creator/showrunner Linda Wallem.

Keeping in mind, once again, that we're limiting our discussion to only the episodes that have aired (as opposed to what's available On Demand a week in advance), what did everybody else think?

Nurse Jackie, "Pilot": Helloooooo, Nurse!

Spoilers for the series premiere of "Nurse Jackie" coming up just as soon as I flush an ear...

"I don't like chatty. I don't do chatty. I like quiet. Quiet and mean -- those are my people." -Jackie Peyton

As mentioned yesterday when I linked to my Edie Falco interview (also available in transcript form!), I didn't get an opportunity to do a proper review of "Nurse Jackie" due to space and time constraints. So this review will be a bit more general than ones for later episodes.

"Nurse Jackie," the pilot in particular, is constructed out of a lot of second-hand parts. We have the medical professional who plays by her own rules ("House" among others), knows more than the people at the hospital who outrank her (ditto), has a painkiller addiction (triple ditto) and has an ongoing relationship that we discover at the episode's end is really an affair, because our heroine has a spouse and kids at home ("Mad Men").

(Note: I'm not saying "House" or "Mad Men" invented any of those tropes. If anything, I was amused when AMC requested we not reveal the end of the "Mad Men" pilot in our reviews, since it seemed so bloody obvious that Don was married, because I'd seen that beat so many other places. I'm just saying that those are two current shows that play in a lot of the same territory.)

But my opinion is that it's not the song, but how you sing it, and Edie Falco makes some beautiful damn music as Jackie.

Forget about any "she's so different from Carmela!" commentary, since that pretty much goes without saying. (The butch haircut alone oughta end that discussion.) Just taken as an isolated performance, it's wonderful: funny where she needs to be (loved Jackie's reaction to Coop grabbing her breast), not overly strident when she's tearing into authority figures(*), just the right amount of tender (which is to say around 10%) in those rare moments where Jackie's facade cracks even a little, and compelling throughout. It took me a couple of episodes to get on board with the show beyond Falco, but she's so damn good I would have given it a whole lot of rope before deciding the rest wasn't for me.

(*) "Nurse Jackie" is gonna look even better next week when TNT's nearly-identical -- but vastly inferior in every way -- "Hawthorne" debuts. I think Jada Pinkett's hands my be surgically glued to her hips in that show.

Yes, they lay on the Jackie-as-vigilante-nurse thing a bit thick here, between the organ donor forgery, the flushed ear, giving the stolen boots and money to the bike messenger's pregnant girlfriend, etc. But pilots often have to color in broad strokes to make an impression, then get more into nuance as they go forward.

But even here, I think Falco plays well off most of the cast, I like the undercurrent of Catholicism throughout, and it works as a dramedy. That is, it doesn't feel too short at 30 minutes, has a nice balance of pathos and laughs, and left me feeling satisfied at the end. (In that way, it's not unlike another show I'm writing about this summer, "Sports Night," though the tones and worldviews of the two shows couldn't be more different.)

Some other thoughts:

• Back when he was starring in Fox's short-lived "Fastlane," I noticed that Peter Facinelli not only looks a little like young Tom Cruise, but sounds exactly like him, and it's one of those things you can't un-learn. So I unfortunately spent a lot of his screen time here noticing that he's picked up on some other Cruise mannerisms over the years, like the way he flares his nostrils. I don't think it's intentional, and this is certainly preferable to, say Brad Rowe (a guy who had a career for a few years in the late '90s because he was a dead ringer for Brad Pitt, even though he couldn't act a lick), but I don't think I'm ever going to not be distracted by this.

• The one part of the pilot I really disliked was Anna Deveare Smith as the nosy hospital administrator. And, really, it took through nearly the sixth episode (the last I've seen in advance) to warm to her. Her character is the one part of the show that feels too broad and easy, and I say that as someone who usually believes the ADS hype.

• Getting back to "Hawthorne" for a moment, that show also features an overly chatty, neurotic, eager nursing student (Vanessa Lengies from "American Dreams"), and, for that matter, NBC's "Mercy" has Michelle Trachtenberg as its overly chatty, neurotic, eager nursing student. I haven't seen "Mercy" yet, other than a clip reel, but I expect Merritt Wever to own them all in in this category. She's hilarious.

• Yes, like everyone else, I'm weirded out by seeing Falco have on-screen sex with Paul Schulze, who played Father Phil -- who very much wanted to have sex with Carmela -- on "The Sopranos." But Schulze -- who, as Falco notes in our interview, has been in more than a dozen projects with her since their college days at SUNY Purchase -- is a really good actor who does some interesting things as Eddie, and I don't want to begrudge him the work just because of the weird meta level to it. By episode 2 or 3, you'll have hopefully (as I did) forgotten about the Father Phil factor.

What did everybody else think?

Edie Falco leaves 'Sopranos' behind for 'Nurse Jackie' - andreikirilenkotattoo on TV

In today's column, I interview Edie Falco about her return to series TV with Showtime's "Nurse Jackie," which I really liked. I also have a full interview transcript.

Space issues in the paper meant I had to run the interview in lieu of a proper "Nurse Jackie" review, but look for it to join the blogging rotation starting tomorrow night. I know the pilot is already out there on-line and via On Demand, but I'm going to ask you to keep your comments vague (opinions are fine; plot details much less so) until the episode review post goes up.