TV review: Falco's performance keeps medical drama's heart beating

Edie Falco shows there's plenty of life after the <i>Sopranos</i> in her portrayal of a flawed character. Photo / Supplied

Nurse Jackie (TV3, 9.30pm, last night) is one tough sister, not afraid to stretch our credibility until we squeal. American telly's latest medical hero isn't shy about treading on other gangs' territory either - watch out mean-mouthed Dr House.

The hard-working blue-collar Nurse Jackie matches her double shifts in the emergency ward of a New York hospital with a double life. On the one hand she's wise, competent and compassionate, happily married with a devoted husband on domestic duty with the two kids.

Then there's the Nurse Jackie who slips off her wedding ring as she enters the gates of work; who's addicted to painkillers, and shagging her dealer - the hospital pharmacist - as a diversion at lunch.

She is the sinner and the saint. "Make me good God, but not yet," she says, acknowledging her role model St Augustine.

Nurse Jackie is a character whose flaws are not so much cracks as full-blown chasms.

And as with its main character, the show itself has much to forgive. Its worst crime, obvious from the above, is that the script-writers are not unduly afraid of being horribly heavy-handed.

Any show that has its "working-girl" lead quoting T.S. Eliot in the opening scene was never going to be subtle.

This was quickly followed by Nurse Jackie remembering the nun who told her the people with "the greatest capacity for good, also had the greatest capacity for evil". Right, we get it.

That's our hero describing herself.

The hospital is a Roman Catholic one, so the air is thick with irony: nuns walking by ethereally while Nurse Jackie is doing the dirty work, for example. In one scene a mad patient hits Jackie across the face.

Later she turns the other cheek.

But all this overwrought symbolism is, for now anyway, easy to overlook. Any show that brings that fine actress Edie Falco back to the screen can get away with practically anything.

Falco, no doubt, will be hoping that Nurse Jackie will blow away her connection to unforgettable mob wife Carmela Soprano.

Gone are the polished talons, the hair, the heavy gold shrapnel. In comes the butch haircut, the polyester work uniform and the flat, sensible shoes.

But Falco brings some of the same qualities to the new role: her mesmerising ability to convey hard-headed pragmatism in conflict with guilt and a desire for redemption.

She's terrific but certainly has her work cut out for her in terms of a show that seems slightly confused. In half-hour episodes (last night's pilot was a double), it has the format of a sitcom. The support cast of fairly stock characters adds to the sitcom feel - the gay nurse, the bumbling administrator, the cocky rookie doctor. But its humour is sparse and black, its nihilistic attitude and confrontational material are the stuff of serious drama.

And it seems to make awkward segues into dramedy in the scenes where Nurse Jackie gets together with her unlikely best mate - a self-absorbed, Manolo Blahnik-worshipping doctor straight out of Sex and the City.

Still, if anyone can pull of a show with identity issues, then Falco can.

Give her a sense of deep self-denial and bundles of contradictions to work with, and she'll write it all over her face.